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Backing Up Laptops In a Small Business?
Bithmus writes "I have been tasked with finding a way for our company to handle our laptop backups. We currently have nightly backups of our servers, but no backups of laptops. In our business we develop, implement, and sell another company's software; I guess that makes us a Valued Added Reseller. During development our consultants will create copies of a customer's database on MSDE on their laptops. If a hard drive crashes, all of the work done on that laptop is lost. There are other files that need to be saved, but the databases are really the important items. Ideally these databases would be stored on the SQL servers and the other files stored on the file server, but this is not happening. What do Slashdot readers do to protect data on laptops or computers outside of a local network?"
For a small business? Probably simple file synchronization. Right-click on a network drive and pick "Make Available Offline." You'll still have to train people to store their shtuff on the network, but at least that way they'll have access to it even if they're not on the network.
Of course, you might run into some issues with files being locked and such, but you're probably going to have that anyway unless you go with either a big expensive solution or you just get people to use SQL server databases instead.
However, just because it needs to be said...
The first time that someone loses a million dollars' worth of data or one of your consultant's laptops (with customer data) gets stolen, it will start happening. I don't have much sympathy for this kind of thing. I mean, it's kind of like saying, "Ideally, the money in the bank should be behind the counters with the tellers instead of just laying around in the lobby, but this is not happening." Make it happen. If you can't, at least make your management aware of the risks they're facing so that when something horrible happens, you've got a nice paper trail showing that you're not the scapegoat they're looking for.
If you were a big company, you could probably buy something expensive to mitigate the risk, but it still wouldn't be a good idea. At my big company, we use Connected DataProtector, and I hate it. Once a day, it runs a backup of my laptop and everything on my machine comes to a grinding halt for five to ten minutes. Oh, and it doesn't back up files in use (you know, like MSDE files under development), so a lot of stuff doesn't get backed up anyway.
For years, I have ordered all of my systems with at least two hard drives. For laptops, I order an additional external drive. Currently, I have a very simple protocol: I use OS X and clone the entire hard drive with operating system to a second hard drive with SuperDuper! It is fast, it is easy and if the laptop dies, I can simply boot directly from the backup drive, be back up and running and I don't even have to reinstall applications or set all my preferences. It's like nothing ever happened. By the way, I also use this approach for all my workstations. Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Shirt Pocket software other than being a satisfied customer.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
External drive or network share?
Irony? Yea, it's like goldy and bronzy, only it's made of iron!
instead of backing up, you should try to back down. It's better for your nervous system.
Maybe you should be worrying about all your customers data floating around random laptops...
Directly put your customers data on big boxes at the office... let people remote desktop in and work. No longer will you have a backup problem for laptops - nor a security problem.
I have found USB external hard drives to be excellent for the purpose of backing up data from either a laptop or desktop. There are also external hard drives sold as one-touch backup solutions as well. Make sure the data is encrypted or the hard drive is physically locked up, because an external hard drive is easy to swipe!
Set up a copy of sql server somewhere on the internet, preferably behind a VPN.
Configure sql server to allow remote connections, but only over SSL.
Then, replicate your laptop databases to the main sql server at your office.
You get the benefit of SSL for strong encryption, but it's still pretty simple.
I don't have time to look up the exact syntax for your- but your consultants do log onto the domain back at home from time to time, right? Here's what you need the script to do:
1. Stop the MSDE service, put up a msgbox asking that all other applications be closed.
2. Run a VB Script or some other program of your choosing that copies the files to a location on your network (you can always reconnect old access databases as long as you save the MSDATA directory).
3. When done, restart the MSDE service.
Sure, your consultants will hate it (it'll take a few minutes every time they log on) but it's the only real option.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I use Bacula for backing up our laptops, but the SQL servers on them are not important, it's filled with fake data anyhow.
How about running a cron job^W^W Scheduled Task and have that do a dump daily, and then have that be pushed up to a server somewhere?
Some posters already mentioned storing data on a fileserver that's backed up (synchronisation or otherwise). I do have to stress one point about that: Laptops are easy to lose and easily stolen, so whatever touches the disk of said laptop, ENCRYPT IT.
I haven't seen much in this area. I use Retrospect for all my computers at work, but laptops are kind of come-and-go. I have 2 backups scheduled every day, and the laptops are lucky if they catch one or two of those per week. And quite honestly, I don't find Retrospect very dependable for that matter, so it's only use it to say "we have a backup server running if anything happens", when in reality, I will do data recovery on hard drives before doing anything with Retrospect. Did this turn in to a rant? I guess my answer in short is that there's no viable backup for laptops that is 100% dependable because of their portability and dependence on connectivity. My department uses a highly-monitored network drive to store nearly all of our information to avoid disaster.
Get a low end 64-bit computer running opensolaris with a nice fat ZFS pool. We use that for backing up laptops at my OSS consultation firm. It works great.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I would be just as concerned with this other matter.
How are you protecting sensitive data on the laptop if its stolen?
WhatMeWorry!
Surely if you are doing any development etc work then you should be storing code/data in CVS or equivalent running on a server.
Remember that source control is not limited to just software. You can use it to store all kinds of stuff (documentation, artwork, video...).
Any business model that depends on critical data in laptops is broken.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This is something I am starting to research at work. Right now we use Tivoli Continuous Data Protection, which seems to work good, and it also keeps multiple versions of documents. We just have mapped drives and do "Local Backup" which points to that drive letter. The only problem we've had is when a laptop hard drive died, and with the way all the documents are saved to the backed up location, the versioning information is included so that you have a document with a bunch of older versions (Document.doc, Document12345.doc, Document 12346.doc, etc). It can take a little while to clean up the older versions, but definitely better than losing the data altogether. If anyone knows of a laptop backup software for Windows XP that is relatively cheap (or even better, free) and does incremental real-time backups to a network (or mapped drive). I don't think versioning is that necessary since most people at my work would never even use it anyways, plus we have a backup server for that.
Only problem I see with Tivoli CDP is that I don't know how it would work if you have users storing data with MSDE. If they are working with mission critical information, then that data really should be stored in a server-side SQL database anyways.
I've been using SyncBack for my work laptop.e s.html
http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/sbse-featur
I'm happy with it so far. You can configure whatever folders you need backed up, where, when, and it does intelligent checking for whether it actually needs to create backups of files based on any number of file attributes.
I'm not sure what business you're in, but whenever you start storing customer database on laptops, you've got a potential security risk. I work in Healthcare and whenever a laptop or tape with hundreds of thousands of patient names gets stolen, bad things happen. The hospital involved typically has to send out mailings to everyone potentially impacted, which can get extremely expensive and damage their reputation.
We had a case of a vendor that ended up making other customer data (fortunately not ours) available on the Internet to the point where Google was indexing patient billing records. It was sad in a way, the owner had spent a decade building up his business and overnight the company vanished.
Though this isn't the answer to your question, please be cautious with the data on your laptop. Even if you have no medical customers, odds are you work with data that has privacy implications. Treat it with care.
You can do all sorts of amazing things with Batch scripting. For example, you can create a batch file to backup any or all databases from MSSQL Server out to files. Then you can take those files and xcopy them to a network server. Now all you need to do is setup a scheduled task to execute said batch file. We've been using a process very similar to the described one above for years w/o any issues. Granted the laptops need to be connected to the network, if they aren't at night, have the scripts run during the day sometime. Also, you must remember, that if the laptop is offsite for a while, it wont get backed up - but as long as its "home" for a backup once in a while - all is not lost when the laptop dies.
snowulf.com
This should work, write a program or script that runs in the background as a scheduled task. Get used to adding include (C#)
//you may want to append a date the file was archived too
using System.Data.SqlClient;
using System
System.IO.File.Copy(OldFileName, NewFileName);
ETC use the system libraries!
I use Mozy Pro for a very similar problem. While, I like doing all my own backup design and implementation, I could not resist the affordable price, and ease of configuration of mozy pro.
If you otherwise cannot avoid it, get each laptop user a geek-stick of appropriate size (a couple of GB), format it with an encrypted file system, and make 'em store everything even remotely sensitive on that. The odds are good that no one is going to go out of their way to target and steal a geek-stick at the airport (at least not as much as they'd want your laptop), and you can be reasonably sure that it will survive being dropped, kicked, shoved about in luggage, etc.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I don't know how well it will work with databases, but we've been experimenting with http://www.mozypro.com/. Its cheap, and I think a major company just started to use them for their desktops. It reticulates splines against already saved data, you can govern how much bandwidth/processor it takes up, can run on its own scheduler, its hipaa compliant(448-bit blowfish encryption), cheap and easy to implement. Of course it freezes once in a while.
Developers should be commiting to a centralized managed repository and not be coding and storing there code locally. End of story. They should be making commits, those commit and those commits should be being handled by a post-commit hook even to possibly get sent to a testing environment for QA to test on the fly (if you are really ballsy and short staffed).
For laptops, (disclaimer: I'm not in any way affiliated with Dantz, but have had very good success with their products, ever since Retrospect 1.0 on Macintosh System 6 in 1989.) I do recommend Retrospect. It can back up open files, has solid encryption, can back up to almost anything, from hard disks to tapes and network shares, and can back up SQL servers. If you can get a laptop to VPN in, I'm pretty sure, you can get Retrospect to back it up (it used synthetic full backups, so only changes get copied over the network.)
Another idea, if you can configure a VPN, is to put all the MSDE data that the laptop users use on one Windows 2003 machine, and run SQL Server and Terminal Services. Then, you can focus on backups of that machine (Retrospect has a lot of options for keeping SQL Server backed up), and less on worrying about keeping client files copied.
I have been using BackupPC for some time now with great results. Despite its name, the software is quite powerful and easily fits borderline enterprise requirements. It'll function with most platforms out there, and has some nifty options for laptop users - meaning the intermittently connected machines.
I have also used Symantec's BackupExec with the Desktop and Laptop Option (DLO) with mixed results. It fits the bill if you're running a homogeneous network.
I wish you good luck. Having fully backed up laptop machines is A Good Thing in my book. I often find disks in portables to be more error prone than stationary machines', though this is probably caused by the wear and tear of a mobile PC.
Lay out some ground rules, make them agree to them, and then if it goes tits up, upon their own head be it.
Otherwise why not provide a database server for testing, that they can access over VPN or something? Then tell them that local databases on the laptop are treated as volatile entities and will not be utilised in deployment. If they have data in them they need, they can script the creation of said data, and then commit the script into version control on their development branch or however you have that set up. Make not following the development policy document a disciplinary issue, but document it well so they know what to do without having to ask around.
But most of all, let them know that it is their problem if it goes wrong, and save your own skin by continually making people above you aware of the issue, occasionally CCing your boss' boss in the conversations.
Yes, exactly. The submitter already knows what the correct solution should be and should be asking "how do I get employees to follow sane backup policies?" not "how do I design a backup solution which can handle hostile users?"
on both their laptop and desktop. Then when the valuable data goes missing, you can easily discredit the employee that lost the laptop. They get fired, you keep your job. Problem solved.
They have a corporate and individual client. The individual offers unlimited backups for $5 per month. The corporate is something like 50 cents per gig, plus $5 per month. The nice part is it's a very intelligent backup client, will run from anywhere, and encrypts the data as you go. (you can use their key or generate your own.)
www.mozy.com
You should check them out. I've been very happy with them.
I set up all my labs laptops with cron jobs that run scripts that track when the drive was last synced, and handles things appropriately using rsync + SSH.
To make things even easier for users to protect data they see as important, I have an icon they can click to sync to the server at any time.
Start here:
. aspx
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/241397
here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/325003
and here:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms170207
Run the backup to local drive as often as you feel necessary. Having the information on a second place of the disk improves your recovery chances _when_ you have to send that bad boy out to a service for recovery.
Copy backups to the network upon login. Copy backups to the network upon login. Copy backups to the network upon login. And finally, make it impossible, or at least very irritating, for the user to interrupt this step.
Personally, I would advocate working off of the professionally(?) managed servers.
CA has a very good product for backup (CA ARCserve Backup - http://ca.com/us/products/product.aspx?ID=263). Take a peek - it might suit your needs.
I'm currently playing with Unison http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ which does syncing through SSH, it runs on Linux, MacOS X and Windows (on Windows you have to install SSH though) Is runnable from a command line and is configurable from a simple text file describing what directories you want synced and what exceptions there are.
It's very similar to rsync except that it has an added module that keeps a history of the directory contents to properly handle syncing file removals/renames/etc. It is quite nice.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
For laptop security we use this: http://www.checkpoint.com/pointsec/ For remote laptop users we schedule a batch file that stops services (if needed) and we use this for backups: http://www.carbonite.com/
For a small business? Probably simple file synchronization. Right-click on a network drive and pick "Make Available Offline." You'll still have to train people to store their shtuff on the network, but at least that way they'll have access to it even if they're not on the network.
This is the right idea, but I smell a major WTF at this company. It sounds like the developers aren't using version control. They really just need to set up a repository for each project (SVN is my default recommendation, but something with better support for binary files would be useful here) and just back up the repositories.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Ideally these databases would be stored on the SQL servers and the other files stored on the file server, but this is not happening.
Ok, so why not do that? You just say, "this is not happening," but you don't say why you can't make it happen.
Problems like these tend to depend a bit on the context. The best solution depends on what your needs are. I don't typically have Windows laptops these days-- luckily the laptops at my current company are much more likely to be Macs. So I put an rsync script to copy everyone's home directly over SFTP to a backup server, and then encrypt the whole thing with FileVault. If I need to, I exclude certain sorts of files (iTunes library and such), and all that's really needed is an internet connection with SFTP ports open. I feel relatively good about the solution. It's simple, it works, and as long as users remember to log out of their laptops (admittedly, a big "if") the data is pretty secure.
robocopy via batch file. either manually or scheduled task it. You can be granular about what you back up that way, and it's a touch more automated than digging through files to back up the ones you need everytime. it'll also only backup changes so it's easier on the network that way. You need to decide if you want your end users controlling this as well as it'll limit/increase the options you have.
we use robo for file copies between servers which works ok but there is limited visibility into the app as you can only log to a text file, then you have to manually scrape the text file for errors. it's cheap(free from M$), and works well, it's just the management that's a bit of a pain.
Dude. Come on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_reseller
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have an XP laptop here, I repartition the basic install to have 15gig (on a 80GB disk) as a root disk with only the base OS on the drive. The remainder was where all my data My Docs etc live. Beyond browsing data and applications nothing lives on the root disk I could have put the User home on the data disk but it's not wise. You could lose the data partition and be screwed. I lose the root partition, worse case I have to reinstall from media.
I just dup the root with regular Windows Backup, Norton Ghost, or what I am actually using now, which is EMC Retrospect. My policy hasn't shifted, just that it Retrospect does Solaris and Linux well too, from a base XP system. Currently I back up the root disk every two weeks in three backup rotation, Data gets done every 4 days. That seems to work well. That backup never amounts to more then 8 gigs to a mounted share. External disks are going to 750gb for about $260 which is a great deal. These days it's faster to plug in a USB2 drive and dump it to that then across a network.
Nice thing about this scheme is that when I went to dual boot this laptop I just had to reparation a non-OS disk rather then risk the OS being mushed.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
for backup including FTP I have been using Cobian Backup for years http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm for sync [copy files on both ends] Horodruin is in use daily night at home morning and afternoon at office http://stefanobordoni.interfree.it/Stefano/horodru in.htm
let people remote desktop in and work.
Since we're talking about laptops here, this is THE solution IMO, covers both failure and theft. Granted, off the LAN, it could get a little sluggish, but you know, security, right?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
IANAL, but I manage several laptops for my partner's law office. After just 1 hard drive failure, encrypted, online backup has already paid for itself several times over. Just set it, forget it, and be prepared to pony up $10 or more per month per machine.
However, if your source files are enormous and you don't want to take the bandwidth hit each night, or you don't really need the ultimate peace of mind that off-site storage gives you, just learn rsync and create a script that copies the DB files to your local storage destination every N minutes or hours. When the destination file already exists, and unless you override the default behavior, rsync will transfer only the difference between source and destination -- usually speeding things up. YMMV.
I tried them. I used a personal private key to encrypt the data (never trust your data to a 3rd party where it is not encrypted by you). Then I replicated a data crash and tried to restore the files to a 2nd computer. Result? I could not get the data to decrypt properly (and yes I did enter the correct key). Google for this issue, it is well discussed...
If you can't, at least make your management aware of the risks they're facing so that when something horrible happens, you've got a nice paper trail showing that you're not the scapegoat they're looking for.
Parent is 100% bang-on. Years ago, as a well-intentioned, bright (but organizationally naive) systems analyst/engineer, I did not do enough to document systems design risks. This was partly because I was simply too confident in my abilities.
Today, I'm careful to report on certain aspects of system functionality that are key development objectives--and what business risks are tied to those objectives not being met. Sometimes, a business has to make the hard choice of willingly flying by the seat of their pants, but a good consultant or employee is there to make the consequences of all choices clear to the management. It's more than just CYA.
If it's logistically possible, a VPN running over a Verizon, Sprint or AT&T Wireless data service may be what's needed. Perhaps it maintains a real-time connection to the back-end or perhaps it backs up periodically. In any event, it would reduce the "exposure window" of damage, i.e., if this laptop is stolen in the next four hours, I know the data was backed up at least once in the previous four hours.
The cost of wireless data cards and service is plummeting: this may be a good time to consider it.
Back in '96 I worked as the database administrator of a county government budget database, 2 gigabytes of multidimensional data containing the work of about 100 people, to track where over $2 billion was going to go in '97.
.8 percent; and creating an Excel add-in to perform common tasks (Sitting with the analysts, to watch their workflow, and observing them do things like manually comparing 2 very long columns of numbers to be sure they were equal... something very easy to automate, so I did)
After I improved the performance by a factor of ten by reordering the dimensions, I had enough free time to be 'proactive', finding and providing fixes for things such as everyones payroll being short by
At one point, I got the systems administrator to do a test restore of the nightly backup.
It seems that since the database software was running, the database file itself was always being skipped.
After messing around with shutting down and restarting the database every night (which did not work well). Eventually I just scheduled a 'report' that exported all the data needed to rebuild it from scratch to a CSV file, along with a copy of the schema.
BackupPC keeps track of a device's ping history. If the device only comes in during the day, after a couple of days the system will start backing it up as soon as it connects to the network.
I use it to back up the LAN, portables, and PCs connecting via VPN -- given that it can back up via RSYNC, SSH and SAMBA, pretty much anything with a HD connected to the network gets put into the system.
The backups are also mirrored for off-site storage so there's always an in-house revision system and an emergency remote restore point. The system works well, and for small businesses can easily store 1.5TB of data on a single 250MB HDD (make sure to mirror).
Use what you have... existing tools and infrastructure, and inexpensive or free software.
You have a network. Use it. Briefcase is your friend.
Set up your laptops with a PGP drive to hold all work information. Unless management likes the idea of your work product being stolen and given to a competitor.
Train your users about where to save their data. Then use policies (Windows, not HR) to enforce it.
If they're in the office regularly, use KIX scripts to copy the entire PGP file to the network. Poof, instant backup on startup. Just tell them to plug in and go for coffee.
If they're not, train them to do backups to media. A pgp drive on a memory stick isn't too bad. Better than unencrypted CDs.
Really, that seems like a good start. All it takes is some common sense and training.
Also, it takes my favourite rule of remote users.
"If you're not smart enough to do Task X, after I show you, do it for you, and give you written instructions... then you're not smart enough to have a computer at home."
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
I haven't seen much in this area. I use Retrospect for all my computers at work, but laptops are kind of come-and-go. I have 2 backups scheduled every day, and the laptops are lucky if they catch one or two of those per week. And quite honestly, I don't find Retrospect very dependable for that matter,
That's because you don't have it set up correctly. Retrospect is fully capable of doing opportunistic backups. Has been for a little shy of ten years. You set a policy for the max age of the backup, pick which clients you use the mode for, and as soon as the client appears on the network, it gets backed up. If you have that set up, then you don't have them on a fast enough network connection. Wireless, at 3MB/sec, ain't gonna cut it. The number of files also has a large effect on completion time; Retrospect chokes on its catalog file.
Not that I'm defending it, don't get me wrong. It's a dying dinosaur. There are numerous alternatives these days. BRU and Atempo are the big boys...
Please help metamoderate.
Laptop users should never... ever... be storing files on the local drive for two main reasons. 1st, should the laptop get lost/stolen, you have a security violation. 2nd, the loss of productivity should the files not get backed up to the network as needed. Don't bother with offline file synchronization as it requires critical thinking of what to keep, and what to copy. Treat the users like idiots. I hate having such a condescending attitude, but better safe than sorry with corporate assests.
A better approach would be for all laptop users to do their work via Terminal Services. Only e-mail should be cached via Exchange mode. Should a user have to have the file stored locally (such a DOC, XLS, or PPT files), drill it into their head it's to be for read-only access. Any changes needed to be done should take place on the Terminal Server. This policy ensures current modified files are being backed up, and discourages users from hording sensitive data on the laptop.
And remember! You must be the BOFH. If you're not being an IT Nazi, you're not doing your job in the best interest of the company.
Life is not for the lazy.
This is super easy. Have .bash_login check whether the machine is at work and can see the backup server. If it can connect to the backup machine, use rsync to send any new changes to it.
Oh, wait, you're using Windows, right? Better get out that company credit card, then. Similar solutions to the above exist for Windows, but they magically cost $40/seat to copy, and the source code was written by Allah himself and must be kept top-secret lest its brilliance destabilize the entire IT industry.
http://www.sonicwall.com/us/backup_and_recovery.ht ml
I would NOT recommend using the "Offline Files" feature in Windows. It sucks. It maintains no folder hierarchy whatsoever. If you start with 1000 files neatly organized in 50 subfolders what you'll get with "Offline Files" is 1000 files dumped into a single folder.
Yeccch.
You can set up a scheduled task to backup the MSDE databases to a directory and automatically purge old versions just like you would do with full-blown SQL/Server. This gives a bit of extra when on-site because if a consultant accidentally drops a table or the like as they have previous versions and potentially journalling to recover from. I now use SQL Express 2005 on my laptop and if you search for "Expressmaint" you'll find some free scripts to replace the automatic maintenance procedures missing from the Express versions of SQL/Server. I can't remember the name but there is an equivalent for the older MSDE versions. Use the Windows scheduler to start the job when the laptop is started each day and periodically throughout.
Assuming the consultants are in the head office occasionally on a LAN then use the free Microsoft Robocopy command-line utilitity to sync the database backup folder and other source code / documents to the server. This could be dropped into the network login script. If they are not in the office this step could also be performed via an Internet VPN connection obviously at a slower rate so maybe it is something they would do overnight at home. Put an additional backup in the script before it starts to get the very latest backup of the databases.
For the final step you need a way to check the users are actually running Robocopy to sync the documents. If you give each user a different directory on the server you can either manually or via a script check the last modification date on the folders. I've been doing things this way for a while and both SQL/Server backup and Robocopy and quite fast so it's not too bothersome.
Not to sound like a fanboy, Windows Home Server is the easiest backup solution I've used yet. For years I've used a Linux box with a few drives RAIDed and shared a few folders via SAMBA, then used SyncToy to duplicate my laptop files on the SAMBA share. Yeah it works, but setting up the RAID and SAMBA is just a pain and SyncToy is pretty flakey. I joined the beta program for WHS and its ridiculously easy: you throw a few drives into an old computer, install WHS which is almost fully automated, then run the "connector" software on each client PC. It'll automatically back up every night, and mirror your data across the multiple drives in the host computer for redundancy. I'm not sure exactly what the launch date is, or what the licensing terms would be for a small business, but its worth investigating.
I recommend Norton Ghost. You can schedule nightly backups that kickoff automatically. I schedule my backup to start at 9:30 PM. I use the Windows scheduler to shut my machine down at 2:30 AM. That give the backup plenty of time to run, and shuts my machine down at a reasonable time. My only gripe is that Norton Ghost does not provide an option to shut your PC down after it completes the backup. I e-mailed them about the problem, but they said they had no plans to fix it.
It cost me $80 for a license, but it provides the ability to retrieve files from the backup without having to restore the backup. That feature alone has covered the cost of the license. Also, I rest easier at night knowing that I can restore my entire machine when the hard drive crashes. Notice I said "when the hard drive crashes". Hard drive crashes are inevitable, and if you are not prepared for them, you are a fool. One other note: I paid for my license out of my own pocket because my boss would only pay for an inferior solution. That is how important daily backups are. If your company will not pay for them, then at least cover your own personal situation.
My company does use a CVS repository and the company policy is daily check-ins. We are effectively using CVS as a daily backup, which it is not designed for. As a result, we have an enormous number of check-ins for every file. Trying to do a diff can become a nightmare as you step back one day at a time until you see the difference you were actually interested in. Also, because developers are forced to check in files before they are actually ready, the descriptions usually read like this, "Saving changes, WIP." Anyone who uses CVS as a backup solution is also a fool. It is a source code repository, not a backup solution. It is better than no backup at all, but most development platforms have a lot of tools and settings that cost a lot of time to duplicate from scratch. You can't check that out of CVS.
If your development platform is Linux or Unix based, you can always use the old method of dump and a cron job. If you do not know what this is, there is plenty of information in the googleplex about how to do this. I think someone recently posted an article to slashdot about it.
If you just want to do weekly snapshots, you cannot beat SystemRescueCD for price and power. We use it for switching operating system images for testing purposes. It can handle all versions of Windows and Linux (except 64-bit Fedora Core). You can use it to backup to a USB drive or to a remote system over the network. It can even backup partitions that use Logical Volume Manager if you know how to use it correctly. It also allows you to do something that very few competitors do: You can backup your master boot record separately from your partition. There are many times when having a backup copy of your MBR can save you a lot of time and hassle.
Captcha: rerouted
Hope and Pray is our plan.
I hope it doesn't happen and Pray I'll have a job after I tell the CEO, "I told you so."
I wasn't given any budget and I was forbidden from using any open source. What do they want?
But even after all that, it will make me feel better to say it.
It sounds like you have identified what is needed to be backed up, now plan how :-)
If there is enough space on the laptop a duplicate copy of the database is a good first step, then rsync that to head office. You should be checking how often the rsync images are updated and chasing tardy users. This stage can all be scripted, we had reps who would plug in the laptop in the evening and this would run during the night every night.
OK so now you have the data in house and secure.
The next stage is what to do when they need the backup?
In a different scenario we used to have VMWARE loaded and running. When a rep said they'd just borked their machine. We sent a new laptop installed and updated with their last backup. We allowed them read only access through PC-AnyWhere to the VMWARE image with their data pre-loaded. The laptop always went the fastest delivery mech and had pre-paid postage for the returning laptop.
The idea was to have the rep up and running ASAP. Another company used to have the dbs sync at night and if the laptop borked we just sent a preconfigured PC with no need to sync the data as that would happen when the rep signed on and dialed in.
I use Rsync on an hourly schedule.. with the -e option of rsync.. you can used a shared key to automatically do the the ssh negotiation.. (so your not prompted) works great..
/home/root/rsync_keys/mirror-rsync-key" /home/ root@myserver.com:/home/boldy_going/
cygwin installed for the windows laptops laptops..
the mac laptops already have rsync
you then need to put your rsync command into a script/batch file:
IE:
#!/bin/sh
rsync -avz -e "ssh -i
the second half of this is to do a nightly tar ball of this on the server.. if you want to get fancier with your scripting you could probably save some space with a tarball of only the modified/created files for the day... ----
All the best
-Ian
I've been using backuppc for probably 3 years now. We use it mainly for our desktops, but it'll grab the laptops as long as they show up on the network for a couple hours a day. It uses single instance storage and compression to save space. Highly configurable. It actually backs up our entire network. Windows machines using smbclient, unix machines via ssh/rsync, allows users to retrieve their own files. The down side is, its not really meant for larger installations I don't think, as all the configuration information information is stored in plain text files, but it can be configured to deal with any machine in a range and stuff.
Now that I sound like a salesman, I'll go away.
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
We use Connected TLM at my office, and it works pretty well. It helps if you're able to leave your PC/lappy on overnight in terms of hands-free automagic scheduling. PCMag had this review from years ago. Their latest offering is called something like "Data Protector" or something like that. There's a subscription cost, so you'lll have to assess if the money's worth the peace of mind. I've been pretty lucky and have not had a HD failure. Folks around me who have had their disks fail say it was a lifesaver. There are a bunch of other companies that more or less have the same kind of offering. I think Iron Mountain has a pretty good one, too. Hope it helps.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
Here is a quick attempt to address the questions above.
First, File synchronization is the easy way to go. I would avoid using the off-line files feature of Windows xp. I've had lots of problems with it. First of all, if the network connection drops for any reason then the user ends up off-line and can't print. Depending on how savvy your users are this can be a problem. I suggest SyncToy from Microsoft or another third party solution.
On the security side, we have Lenovo Thinkpads. With the embedded security chip we can setup encrypted drives that allow users to store files that cannot be opened without the users password (or fingerprint). This software and hardware comes standard on most of the Thinkpads.
If you are never moderated, do you really exist?
The system works well, and for small businesses can easily store 1.5TB of data on a single 250MB HDD (make sure to mirror).
Really? That's some AMAZING compression. Still, where would you find a 250MB hard drive these days?
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Imaging software... Iv used both Acronis and Norton Ghost and found either one to be just fine. It doesent take very long to make an image or to restore it and I found images fairly handy...
he meant 250gb, but either way, it does a nice setup for duplicate files.. every file gets CRC'd or similar, and if it already has a duplicate, whether it's from a previous backup, or even a different server, it just hardlinks to that... so 30 windows pc's with similar setups would only take a few gig to have a years worth of backups
This is blatant misinformation.
They are techincally stored in a fashion similar to this (not really, they are split up so directory sizes don't grow too huge) but they appear in their normal folder trees. (you access them exactly as you would if you were network connected)
Why post flat out deceptive comments?
Errr, no you don't?
My work laptop has it's My Documents folder pointing at a network drive which is offlined. When I connect to the vpn or the work network, I can synchronize it fairly quickly. The central file server is backed up to tape every day. If I break my laptop, I get a new one, whack a standard image on, and my files are all still there. If I delete the remote copy (because I'm stupid), I just request yesterdays tape be restored for me.
Works great. Folders and all.
There is nothing interesting going on at my blog
I use Citrix to work from my laptop and have a 3G card that sustains about 500Kb/s data, which is plenty for that. If the laptop is dropped/stolen/run over/burned, I've only lost hardware and can just wander over to any machine with web access--and often don't even need to install any client software. Setting up a standard VPN+RDP solution is pretty simple and a lot cheaper (read: essentially free).
Besides, it is not an entirely bad idea to nail into people's heads that their laptops should essentially be blank slates should they be lost or stolen. By working over VPN+RDP, they can use all the resources you have internally without exposing that data to outside threat except for the most extraordinary circumstances (say, MI6 is listening) while requiring only a very modest amount of external bandwidth and everything is backed-up at LAN speed as often as you require.
The mac version is using mobile accounts rather than normal accounts.. Mobile accounts are the laptop version of NIS/NFS (or ldap) login systems but with an additional set of scripts that sync on login/logout. This will provide you the backups you need for the laptops and also provide simple replacability of any given laptop/desktop system since all accounts are available on all machines with the proper setup.
so it's dd with a GUI and you're paying for it...?
We have a smaller site with its' own onsite server, probably similar to your business.
We use Drive Snapshot - http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/ - and just run a scheduled task to back the entire hard drive up (replacing that PC's old image) weekly.
This may or may not be of use to you, depending on wether your laptops are in the office regularly or not.
I've never personally tried it, but BackupPC looks like it might be able to do the job. AdminsParadise offers the ability to get this set up and running quickly, and it appears to be rather pain free. Oh, and did I mention that BackupPC is licensed under the GPL?
Do any of you have any experience with this setup? If so, how well does it work?
This isn't the sig you're looking for...
"Ideally these databases would be stored on the SQL servers and the other files stored on the file server, but this is not happening."
Well there's your answer: Make it happen.
Laptops (a) should NOT have critical information stored on them, and (b) should ABSOLUTELY NOT NEVER NO WAY be the only repository for critical information.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Push images with rsync and back those up. Rsync will only send what has changed so you can push the updates from a crappy link once you have seeded the image from your lan. You could launch the backup only if the IP match a given pattern; you probably don't want to push a backup from a hotel room.
++Strong Bias
// I work at Avamar, I helped found it in 1999, Avamar was bought by EMC back in November 15, 2006.
see "EMC | Avamar"
Avamar's solution has very low overhead on a Laptop and after the first backup, subsequent backups usually take less than a minute. It also deals nicely with opened files. If you don't want to buy a multi Terabyte server to run it, it is available as a service from a number of vendors in a rebranded form. For example from AT&T it's called "AT&T Online Vault"
--Strong Bias
There are of course other services/products out there, just look.
First of all, to all you smug pricks who offer comments like "don't keep important data on a laptop" or "your business model is broken" - this ia a real problem for many people. If you don't have a real suggestion then STFU. It should be well understood in a place like Slashdot that not every IT guy gets to set corporate policy. Sometimes you have to work with what you've got.
On the topic of laptop backups, I've been dealing with this issue for years. Here are some thoughts:
For simply backing up a few critical files, consider a USB Flash Drive. I usually write a simple .bat file using xcopy to backup particular files or folders, then create a shortcut with a friendly name for users to double-click on. With a bit of thought you could probably create an autorun.inf file that backs up when the USB stick is inserted. One caution - drive letters may be slightly unpredictable.
For a more thorough backup, clone the entire drive to an external drive. There are many programs that can do this but these days my favourite is Acronis True Image. Acronis could clone on a schedule if you can train users to connect an external drive overnight, for example. It's always nice to have a complete backup including OS, applications and data. Acronis also lets you browse inside a backup image and extract individual files if needed.
What I've always really wanted was a solution that would detect when a server was reachable and backup transparently. I use something just short of this on my own laptop - product called Mirror Folder that I schedule to copy specific folders when I'm connected to my home network every night. This could probably work over a VPN as well. Very simple, very cheap.
If you have a larger budget than me you might be interested in something like Atempo LiveBackup.
Nice to see it survives to this day.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Use Gparted. Its a live Linux distribution that lets you copy partitions from on hard drive to another and works with USB drives. This works really well because one big USB drive can be used to backup many systems OS partitions. Its very fast and works very well. Its very similar to doing a disk images except faster because your just coping the partition between drives.
I don't think you were using Offline Files the way it was meant to be used. Yes, if you set files to be available offline, then you can see them all (w/ no hierarchy) in the Offline Files folder/shortcut that you can place on the desktop. The point of offline files though is for files to still be accessible when you go to the mapped drives that they were on. For instance, lets say you have a file such as Z:\folder\document.txt (stored on a mapped drive), and it is set to be an offline file. When you are not able to connect to the file server, then document.txt will still show up in Z:\folder. When you open it you will open the copy of it that is cached on your computer (in strange looking files in C:\windows\csc). You actually don't even have to use mapped drives, I'm pretty sure that Offline Files will work with UNC addresses (like \\server\share\) as well.
I've used Offline Files on my laptop for the past year for my home directory. While I've always sort of been skeptical of it, it has actually always worked fairly well. Additionally you can have the files encrypted on the client's harddrive, to make it difficult for someone to get them by booting to Knoppix or something.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
use acronis trueimage workstation, awesome software - images any disk on the fly (even current system disk), takes less than an hour to backup my 100GB disk. so you can be anywhere and have a full backup on hand. if you use the disk copy routine, you then have an exact duplicate of your existing system, so in the case of disk failure, you can just swap out the disks, boot up and carry on.
cheap, simple, light weight, secure, fast.
whats not to like?
FileKeeper.
www.filekeeper.com
I use it, and it's perfect for mobile users. Protects any type of closed or open file. Even custom apps.
This is for windows operating systems only. The name may sound ungainly, but the software (particularly the recent v3.1 refresh) works really well for this sort of use case. Pricing is approximately $50/license, available in 25-packs direct from IBM, or in smaller increments from a reseller. Very good value for money, and I say this as a satisfied customer.
o ntinuous-data-protection/
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/c
Backs up to network drives, WebDAV folders, or tivoli storage manager servers. The first two will be applicable to small businesses.
The software monitors the I/O drivers, and just copies changed blocks once an initial synch has been done. This ensures that only the changed data is pushed over what can be a preciously network link.
It can also simultaneously keep a copy of the protected data in another folder/directory, allowing for immediate restore should a file get corrupted. Very handy stuff.
The most challenging element with the setup then becomes getting a quiesced copy of the database files. This can probably be acheived by having the administrators write a small script to stop MSSQL, run a manual backup, then restart MSSQL. A bit annoying, but backing up MSSQL live is normally the realm of far more expensive software.
I just have all my users print out all the data from their hard drives, in binary, onto carbon paper. Daily. The costs may be prohibitive for you. But the peace of mind for me is priceless.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
I evaluated Live Backup from Atempo a year or so ago (http://www.atempo.com/products/liveBackup/default .asp)
Was pretty good, but my major concern was the massive file storage requirement for the backed up data.
Microsoft is about to release Windows Home Server (WHS) in the next few weeks. This is about the best software ever released for use in the SoHo environment. I've been beta testing it since the first beta. You can also couple this with Mozy for offsite backup of your data (really cheap to do offsite storage). I'd highly recommend doing both, so you will have "full bare metal restore" capability with WHS as well as offsite storage for full Disaster Recovery.
Good luck!
Joe.
"Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with any Microsoft Product."
There are two ways to fix this:
1. Fix the server access problem so that people work as intended.
2. Use something like CVS to store back critical data.
Using a laptop backup process to keep a broken system going is silly. Rather fix the system so it does not need backups.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
For a MS SQL server database (which MSDE is), you need to either:
1) Export the data first or
2) stop the database engine before backing it up
So, any solution like this needs to have some scripting at the "pre backup" and "post backup" phases so that stopping and starting of the database engine is done. Also, the user will have to be asked if it is OK to stop the database for a backup. Most likely best to just do an online dump of the database and back up the dump so that the user doesn't have to stop working.
You can store binaries in CVS just fine. It doesn't diff them, but it will
version them, so you can go back to how things were tuesday afternoon if you
had a bout of insanity wednesday morning.
Most likely he hadn't used offline files enough to know. If someone puts a shortcut on their desktop to "their offline files", then they do show like he mentioned. However, as most folks who use Windows know that is only 1 view into them and the standard view accessing them by either mapped drive or \\server\share\folder just like in when connected is more prevalent and works better.
I will say that on XP the offline files feature is not very stable when used with large data sets and does not attempt to do any binary differentials on copies so it is probably not a good solution here, especially since most people would know better than to attempt to use this on a file that is normally locked when the system is up (unless you have SQL set to only be running when you want it running it will try to lock the file all the time and will not survive online/offline transitions and won't sync.
Using your own key with Mozy works fine *if* you take the option to save the binary key file (I've had to do this in a real recovery situation), but I've never successfully been able to re-enter a key as text.
In general their restore process blows, but I still recommend them because once you figure it out the first time it's not too bad. My clients will be calling me if they actually need to get something back...
-R
simple, effective, full and incremental, hourly, daily etc.
but sorry, only on linux,mac,solaris,unix etc.
if you use windows, that's a nice opportunity to move to a decent os.
If you have just copying user's data, i.e. \Documents and Settings\user, a simple xcopy can copy everything over or if you want to get clever and have a bit more functionality, install Cygwin and use rsync. Use pushd and popd to get a network drive. Put a backup.bat in startup and give the user the option to backup. If they want to take the time, they can backup, if not, they can continue their day.
If using Windows, use the MS Synctool (free). Has a simple scheduler. I use it for my last 2 personal windows machines. Relatively fast (I sync GBs of data between a desktop and laptop every night).
If using Linux, rsync (free) and cron. I use it for my ubuntu machines.
If using mac, wait until leopard, then use timemachine (free). I use it on my leopard test machine. Until then, use rsync.
i suppose i am just . jaded due to all the deliberate misinformation that lives here. i see motive behind simple ignorance.
2 wrongs don't make a right (and before someone thinks they are witty.... 3 lefts yadda yadda yadda)
Most, if not all of the big backup software vendors (i.e. probably including the backup software you use for your servers) have plug ins/agents that will backup both desktops and laptops.
And usually it's not actually that expensive. A quick 30 seconds search through some suppliers puts the price at somewhere around £10 per laptop or desktop.
Also, usually you'll find that these products feature delta compression/synchronization abilities, same kind of thing as rsync.
What the hell are you doing storing data on a laptop, anyway? Symantec DLO works well for me on my desktops, but I would never put sensitive data on a laptop - that's asking for trouble. Do you read the news?
People with good reason to create important data on their laptops get the TSM client installed and configured, and they get taught how to click through and backup, as well as to do their own restores.
Novell's iFolder is great for laptops that travel in and out of the office. Has an open-source version as well as a commercial--so management can pick their comfort level. Clients run on Windows, Mac (better support coming soon), and Linux. Setup some automated methods of dumping your MSDE data.
Check it out: http://www.novell.com/products/ifolder/
-m
http://www.invisik.com
In this day of laptop data being stolen, I hope your encrypting your laptop hard drives. If I would find out my company database is on a laptop where the IT department doesnt even have a backup, I would be finding another vendor. Why does the database need to be on the laptop? Why not generate sample data or at least scrub the data and use dummy data for development work?
Get one USB-powered 2.5" external hard drive per laptop, and write some quick & dirty batch files. You can use the "set /p" command to account for changes in the drive letter.
Once a day, it runs a backup of my laptop and everything on my machine comes to a grinding halt for five to ten minutes.
A solution is not a solution if it doesn't get used. We have only 5 guys with laptops, but some are smart enough that they can cause trouble. I was using a network backup to tape drive, but these guys could go into their Windows task manager and kill the process, 'cause they didn't like the way the backups bogged down their performance. Since I had a solution in place, my ass was covered, and they were on the hook for any problems if we didn't have a current backup. Still, a laptop loss or hard disk failure will cause me a lot of headaches, whether or not it's my fault.
So the second option I implemented was external hard drives for all laptop users. They can back up their own stuff, whenever is convenient for them. Yet they are kinda lazy and very busy with other stuff, so I've been hearing rumors that some laptops are only getting backed up once a week. Or worse. With the external drives in the users hands, I can't keep any track of what is going on. Once again, my ass is covered, but a disaster will still be a headache for me.
What my guys need is something with logs that I can see, and will back up their laptops to a server, but will give them some scheduling control so as not to interfere with their work. The compromise we are working towards is some file synchronization software. Something that has scheduling capability, but can also be initiated by the user. When they are VPN'ed in, or in the office and connected to the network, and they are going to lunch or heading to a meeting, they can click an icon on the desktop to set off the file transfer. I can see a log on the server and know who hasn't been backing up in a while, and send a reminder email, or even automate the email reminders.
This idea is promising, but I'm wondering what new problem will crop up with it. I'm looking at Vice Versa and SyncBac , for the software, which both have nice features. I'm going to check out BackupPC after seeing it mentioned in this thread.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
A Retrospect server will look for laptops when they connect to the network and back them up. The laptop just runs a little client app. I thought this is what everyone did...
Norton Ghost is ideal for your situation. Back your ghost images to an encryopted share and you're set. Also in case of a hardrive failure you will be back up and running in an hour. I can't believe not everybody uses this scheme especially with storage running about $0.25 a Gig!
I use the same system personally.I recommend it to all my clients. Haven't had any complaints yet!
Hajo Monogamy: Belief so strong that millions of people end perfectly good relationships in order to start a new one.
Our server checks every half hour to see if a laptop is on the network. If it finds it, it does rsync-over-ssh to back up the laptop (we use a special SSH key for the purpose.)
Our script also won't back up a given laptop more than once every 8 hours.
This assumes that the laptops run Linux or some kind of UNIX. If you run Windoze, then you'll probably have to look for an expensive inflexible proprietary solution, but you should be used to that by now.
I agree. As the owner of a small design office with up to a dozen, I used Retrospect to automatically back up everything including the Mac and Windows laptops. This is much better than the local option, and a tape was always off site!
Thinking about losses made me shake. Thank god for beer...
I recently just did some research and testing on this very thing. I've been testing over the last month or so the Dell DataSafe web-based backup solution and found it to be reliable, easy to use and configure, and relatively inexpensive. Prices start at $9 a year for up to 3 GB of backup storage space to $39 a year for up to $30 GB of backup storage space. They have custom storage/pricing options as well if you need more space. They have a free 30 day trial with up to 3 GB of backup storage (which is what I tested). Backups are reasonably quick - 20 minutes for 2.75 GB of data over a T1 line. Because it is web-based, files can be accessed from anywhere with an Internet connection. I wouldn't call it a complete DR solution but for quick and dirty backups and restores it fills the need. Eventually when Dell has all the web-based features up and running it will be a truely awesome solution. Unfortunately at this time it is Windows only.
There's a great app out there from Tivoli that's call CDP (constant data protection). The lic is cheap (40$), and basically, it replicates everything whenever it can to a central fileserver via CIFS / WebDAV or even TSM if you use Tivoli Storage Manager.
It's an amazing product, and it's even WAN conscious; so you've got the best of both worlds for data replication & recovery. It also does subfile replication which avoids to send the whole file over the wire if there's just a few blocks changed.
Of course, there's CDP that's cheap and effective; the next best thing is Tivoli Storage Manager. The clients can be configured to PUSH instead to get pulled from the backup server. So you can have your laptops everywhere and and not necessarily connected to the lan during your backup window, and it will stream all the changes over the net to your TSM server in an encrypted fashion and allows your to even do bare-metal recovery.
Both sweet stuff.
Great free service that was bought by Microsoft. Just install it on a fileserver at your office, and on the laptops. It will automatically sync files when it can. As long they have an internet connection overnight everything is sync'd
Or implement one of the replication options (not an option with MSDE, but you started out talking about SQL Server...).
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
set up the laptops with a standard image that has one locked down user account that automatically signs in. then use livepc technology to let you automatically push an updated image via the web/lan to any machine whenever a user launches it. they have some smart caching technology that lets you carry the images on a usb stick so you can work off-line and it can do automatic backups to a machine whenever you plug the usb key into it. its pretty much perfect for managing a clean maintainable mobile environment.
100% Agree with BackupPC. I use it at home and have had to restore single files as well as whole computers. Runs like a champ on desktops or laptops alike!
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
Take a look at Asigra (www.asigra.com) it's good for backing up locally and remotely.
pretty much everybody at my fortune 500-company is issued laptops.
pgp desktop for full-disk encryption and symantec DLO for file backups.
your backup has 2 problems. one is technical in nature, the second is operational.
1/ technical. you have lots of programs that can back up the data you need. and you dont have to spend a lot of money either.
http://www.superflexible.com/ lots of nice options, even copies locked files, dumps them to a drive, a tape, or ftp, just look at it. its not the only option, but you find people who have written software to do a job, not create a structure to rationalize screwing you out of thousands of dollars.
2/ getting your mobile staff to follow protocol and back up their laptops. now thats the hard part. you need to develop a policy on what do to make the backups work, offer some training if needed to get it right, and hold your contractors feet to the fire for breaking the policy. you clients data, your business data is the same as a doctor doing open heart surgery. "If you screw it up because you didnt follow a basic safety protocol, were going to pull your license"
There is no excuse for not backing up data. The tech to do it is cheap, getting staff to follow the rules is the hard part.
Yeah, it swaps the 1's with 0's, and then runs gzip on it :p
Two suggestions: First, a cheap way of synchronizing files is with MS Sync Toy. The laptop user can simply run the sync at a predetermined time. A more complex solution is to run Symantec's BackupExec Desktop and Laptop (DLO) option. DLO is geared specifically for ensuring data on the desktop/laptop is protected and stored in on an enterprise server.
Oh yeah, I answered this two years ago: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=156736&cid=131 39296
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
It has support specifically for laptops.
backuppc rocks. been using it for over a year now flawlessly in a laptop rich environment.
james
(this is offended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
VPN to the office and use a terminal server of some sort. M$ Remote Desktop, Citrix, VNC, Go-Global, etc.
I work primarily on Linux boxes at work, but connect to them remotely using Go-Global from my windows laptop, or use VNC from my Mac at home. No sensitive customer data on my hard drive, no sensitive employer data on my hard drive, continually backed up at the office, and persistent sessions so I never worry about saving before the battery dies.
Laptop hard drives are for music, movies, some presentations and spreadsheets that need to travel, and a cache of your email so you can catch up on emails offline on the plane. Keep your valuable data at the office, and encrypt your hard drive regardless. Ideally buy a hard drive with hardware based encryption.
I use a Linux server running Samba. The laptops login to the Samba domain, and the user profile information is synchronized when they logout. The server gets backed up at night. If a system fails, rebuild it, log the user in, and they're immediately back in business. There are some shortcomings, but if the group is small, education isn't that difficult.
For our business I wrote a couple of scripts that do the following: .ssh protected. Then rsyncs all files to the central server
;^)
Backup: downloads the latest version of itself and "rsync" from the server
rsync: makes everything in c:/Documents and Settings world readable, then makes its own
Since our company uses a lot of outlook we reboot the computers into safe mode before we start the backups. Takes one intern an hour or two to back up almost 50 PCs. He does them like dominos starting one after the other then going back and shutting them down.
Anybody know a nice way to make windows boot into safe mode and run this script then shutdown? Would safe my intern some evenings
"DENIAL"-How an optimist keeps from becoming a pessimist- \ \
I've been using Bacula for a while and it is a great open source backup system. It is available for all major platforms and should be able to do what you want. It will most likely require the laptops to be connected to your LAN from time to time.
Okay, so it's not free, it's not open source, it's Windows only, and it's from a company that you've probably not heard of.
LiveBackup from Atempo will solve a lot of these problems. You will need a dedicated backup server, preferably with a lot of disk and a tape library/autochanger.
With LiveBackup, as the network clients (the laptops) have changes made, compressed, encrypted block-level changes are sent to the LiveBackup server, and applied to each machine's backup image. Data is de-duplicated on the server (ie, 10 machines, each with an identical SOE will only take the space of just over one machine, as the gigs of identical files are referenced, not duplicated). You can roll back to any point in time, as it's a live backup, not a scheduled task to run incremental or full backups.
The backup server won't complain if it can't find a client on the network, the client initiates communications with the server, not the server polling the clients. As it's a block-level copy, if you get a 2k email adding to a 2GB PST file, only the 2k or so of changed blocks are backed up...
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Yes you can use replication with MSDE. I currently have it running on a handful of laptops for one of my clients.
JungleDisk (http://www.jungledisk.com/) has some built in backup features. S3 storage is cheap and reliable.
My philosophy is to make the users own their laptops. The company can finance them, but the user must own them. Otherwise, the laptops are treated like rented cars: badly.
It's amazing how much more respectfully the machines and their data are treated by people who own them. And it's amazing how much more willing they are to learn how to care for them properly. Many of the solutions here work well, but all of the best ones require the diligence of the users. That only happens when they own.
My other recommendation is always, always encrypt.
-- "The only thing that is ever new in the world is the history you do not know." -- Harry Truman
The problem with offline folders is that they only work well for one user on that laptop, especially if it's the home share that's being offlined here.
But let's get back on topic. If it's not a really a chronological backup that's needed, then maybe https://www.foldershare.com/ could be a possible solution to the problem.
It synchronizes user-specifyable folders amongst multiple machines in a real-time fashion, so this might work well if those roadwarriors also have a desktop in the office they could synchronize to. Foldershare is also free as in beer.
Another solution could be http://www.logmein.com/ which is not free, but has many useful modules, backup being one of them. They also offer really good remote access solutions, which might be a selling point for some of the IT managers.
Roaming Profiles are probably the easiest way to get this done fairly transparently to the user. It will take a long time to log on the first time after this is set up, but it won't be bad after that. Just make sure that users store their databases in their My Documents folder or on their Desktop or some other obvious place like that. You can't use Windows Offline Folders syncronization, because that blocks syncing any files it thinks is a database. As stated before, encrypting people's drives is probably a good idea. If you do this, roaming profiles will store an unencrypted verion of the users' files on the server, which can easily be backed up at night, leaving you with a plenty of recovery options.
Falconstor disk-safe replicator.
It can work in a number of ways, but essentially its like a volume replication thing where it continuously replicates the hd itself to another device (usb drive or iscsi drive). Now while your on the laptop outside you can replicate to a partition on the usb drive. In the office you can use something like an iscsi lun to replicate to.
Its not terribly expensive from what i remember for only that capability (like $99/laptop?). If you use iscsi and it cant see the iscsi lun (offsite), it just keeps a log of the changes and sync's then when it can get to the iscsi lun again.
If you add a second product i cant remember the name of (another falcon stor product) you then get some more manageability like taking snapshots of the replicated disk, quessing databases and stuff like that. But I think thats where it starts getting expensive.
There are other options. Acronis is very kewl in that you can image your hd when you feel like it (and typically quite quickly too) and it has alot of kewl features (does even allow for incremental images too iirc), plus it works on linux partitions.
Typically speaking, i find laptops + centrallized backup can be really painfull sometimes though and why i think falconstor is quite a nice product for its price/feature set because it can actually exist with a centralized backup solution that you might already have (i.e. backup the iscsi lun locally).
I use http://www.carbonite.com/ to back up all my machines. It is relatively cheap. Just remember that for "unlimited" one should read "about 50GB". After that the transfer speed becomes so low that it's almost not worth it.
double penetration;
For a company in IT allowing staff to walk around with customer data on laptops is un-forgivable. I bet there is no encryption. Forget about backup, get the real issue sorted first or there wont be a business and no need for backup.
``If a hard drive crashes, all of the work done on that laptop is lost.''
Sounds to me like you could gain a lot from setting up a version control system. Run it on a machine other than the one on which primary development takes place, and have your consultants check in their changes. This will not only give you backups, but also a host of features (such as the ability to go back in time or make diffs between versions of files) that, in my experience, are very valuable. Needless to say, it also makes cooperating on projects a lot easier, should you ever want to do so.
As a version control system, I would recommend Subversion. I haven't tried all of them, but it seems to me that Subversion is the only one that is (1) stable (2) widely supported by software (3) scalable from small and simple to large and complex projects (4) cross-platform and (5) open. It's not perfect, and it might seem harder to adopt than some proprietary solution that is pushed by the vendor of some software you already use, or it might seem primitive compared to some more advanced version control systems, but the properties I mentioned are my best stab at finding something future-proof. Do you know what the software landscape will look like in 5 years? Will you want to migrate code out of some abandoned experimental or proprietary system? My answer is "no" to both, and I think Subversion is the safest bet.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Unison is an excellent rsync-frontend with a nice gui for synchronization without the "grinding halt"... http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
Where is the download? The SF website I can only find the source code!!!
Will this application work without a server? I would just like to be able to backup multiple images of my system to an external USB 2.0 hard disk with compression and maybe encryption. Of course the client should be small and run in the background and only backup when I tell it to backup. Seems like BackupPC might be the trick but I can't find the download???
Indeed, BackupPC does some clever tricks when storing (partially) identical files, which they call "pooling". So it's not actually compression (it does that in addition to the pooling, too), but rather the non-storage of redundant information that saves lots of space in the backups.
I'm slightly surprised noone has suggested Coda http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/; mind you I haven't read all the rest of the comments - this is Slashdot (& I'm at work)! It looks like Coda would be ideal for this sort of disconnected use of files from a file server, and I'm quite looking forward to giving it a spin on the next laptop I buy. Has anyone else got much experiance of using Coda? Does it actually work well, or is the synchronization a PITA, and what about its speed compared with that of NFS or SMB? Thanks for any feedback.
So now your machines have no security on their Documents and Settings folder? Or do you somehow magically restore all the permissions afterwards?
We backup about 40 laptops a night (Just My Documents, anything else, tough, you know you should keep important stuff in My Documents)
We use Asigra Televaulting http://www.asigra.com/ A lot of larger VARs sell this and it is quite a good product, all data encrypted, you can specificy maximum number of generations etc etc. Users can even do their own restores (if you allow them to) Ok it isn't cheap but its good and we have users who have in excess of 25 GB of data to backup, and after the initial backup, can easily be done over a DSL line. Completely transparent to the users.
Take a look, its good stuff.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
I'm using a laptop at work, and we are urged to make regular backups (using an in-house tool). Of course, those who know how to make backups do it with a better tool, and those who don't, well, I don't think they've even read the FAQ on that in-house thing.
Periodic backups are fine for stationary and/or always-on(-and-connected) machines, but not so much for laptops (which may or may not be connected to anything when the backup is due). Alternatively, users would have to remember to occasionally start the backups themselves. Yeah right, like that'll get done.
So instead of messing about with periodic backups, I believe in going for a real-time backup strategy. That is, copy every file as soon as it's been saved. Things not being saved don't need to be backed up (again) anyway.
For that I'm using PowerQuest DataKeeper, which comes packaged with some other PQ products we have licensed. I'm sure you can get it standalone, too. Google.
The neat thing is that you give it *two* backup destinations: one remote, one local. When the remote destination is unavailable, it buffers locally; when the remote destination again becomes available, it flushes its buffer and then backs up to the remote destination. It's zipping stuff as it goes, which would allow me to access files manually in an emergency.
The only drawback is that it's kinda slow. I have a feeling it's trying to be polite and not hog my bandwidth, but when I'm logging out (and it's flushing the last files) I don't really want to wait for its politeness.
I know Tivoli has something called CDP for Files, but I've only tried it briefly. I believe there was some trouble with file masks (things to never copy), and in any case it requires Tivoli-ish file access (so no direct access).
I've also tried desperately to find an open source project that does the same thing, but no luck so far. I will look into doing something about that myself, "when I get some free time". If we still use personal computers by then, heh.
"Good news, everyone!"
SVN works fine for binary files.. in fact, all files in SVN are binary, and all diffs are binary. It was simpler that way to handle things like UTF-8, or whatever file format you want.
BackupPC is not a client based solution, but consists of a server that retrieves files to back up through already existing channels, such as Samba (for windows based computers), rsync and ssh.
mats
One man's ceiling is another man's floor.
Mod up - I agree. Assume also we're talking about XP offline files - I've also had *lots* of problems with this. Not always easy to recover from either. I just don't trust it as a backup solution. It's more for nomads who come back into the office and want to sync their docs; not really a reliable backup solution for professional developers.
Incremental backup via secure VPN via internet - IMHO the best option - should be easy to arrange. What do you do for your main off-site backups? Do you have a service provider for this? The same one as for your disaster recovery, perhaps? If the answer to the above is 'no', then you've got bigger potential issues than some field guy getting his laptop stolen. OK, VPN can be a pain to setup, especially from a customer site, but its not impossible.
For the local backups, issue everyone with a USB (or better still, firewire, if laptop supports it - rare), external disk drive and some professional-quality backup software. Agree a backup policy, together with simple clear processes & procedures that the field guys HAVE TO FOLLOW. After all, these are tech-savy people, right? Make sure that it's clear that your responsibility ends with providing the solution - in this case, it is clearly the user that should be responsible for backing up the data, not the sysadmin.
No, seriously. My orginazation has about 12000 users, some of them have backups, some don't most of them doesn't seem to care and as they are students it's hard to force something upon them. But, what I would like, is a solution where the students can point to a folder on the disc and say, each time the machine reboots or once a day or something take backup of that folder and I don't want to know anything about it or get any pop-ups. And there would of course have to be a server they can access through a web-browser where they can retrieve their data when (not if!) something goes wrong.
Does anyone know about such a system, preferably a GNU licensed one?
Set up a private linux box that is your own personal server with scrounged parts. Do backups quietly. Encrypt the drives. Don't trust anybody else. Run critical backups of other's boxes to 'the network' and just don't get specific about which server it's headed to. Not like they'll care, anyway. You sure as hell won't be the first. I wasn't, a decade ago.
When somebody needs a restore, take their box and tell them you'll see what you can 'recover from the drive'. Don't tell anybody what you're actuallly doing.
Yeah, it's risking your job, but not having backups also risks your job, and getting caught using unlicensed commercial software can land you in worse shape than just getting fired -- your bosses could throw you to the wolves.
Good luck.
hanzie.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
The first time that someone loses a million dollars' worth of data or one of your consultant's laptops (with customer data) gets stolen, it will start happening. I don't have much sympathy for this kind of thing. I mean, it's kind of like saying, "Ideally, the money in the bank should be behind the counters with the tellers instead of just laying around in the lobby, but this is not happening." Make it happen. If you can't, at least make your management aware of the risks they're facing so that when something horrible happens, you've got a nice paper trail showing that you're not the scapegoat they're looking for.
I could not agree more with what you just said. Companies should never allow critical data to be stored on a company laptop and never on a personal laptop. Employee's and management must be security trained and aware.
This may not be for the corporate user but the way I backup my laptop is to use a 320GB disk and connect it to one of my USB ports and use "Clonezilla" to backup the image of my laptop. Your machine needs to be down while you generate the image. This works on MS Windows XP (should work on 2000, 2003 and Vista as well), Solaris and Fedora 7 (it should also work on any Linux machine). It can take approx 20 minutes to image approx 30GB of data across a USB 2 connection which actually creates an image directory on my hard disk (date time stamped and configurable). Recovery time is approximately the same as the backup time.
The "Clonzilla" software is open source and it will only backup and compress (again configurable) what it knows as data although for Solaris it assumed the whole of the disk (ie. a full disk image). A nice feature is being able to backup to an NFS mount or an ssh login which is my preferred method for remote image backups and this would work on a corporate ssh server (I can use my Laptop or any Unix machine) since you don't need to be root to actually do the image backup but you do in the case of "Clonezilla" need to boot form CD but only once every month or so. Backup and recovery are limited by your network speed.
An interesting feature of using an ssh server to collect image backups is you can easily maintain some images for corporate roll outs although you may have issues with MS Windows because of licensing. For Linux/Solaris you should not have any issues. Another feature is the ability to manually customise your disk partitions or even LVM volumes depending on the disks you are using by simply editing the configuration text files in the image directory on the ssh server or hard disk.
I have found that I only need one image backup per month for a laptop or every time I get a new kernel and with Fedora 7 that is approx every three weeks. You can use any good backup software for day to day backups of you personal data. Of course in the case of Linux/Unix you only need root and your home or users directory and recovery is very easy. You should be root to do the backup but you don't need to be root on the ssh server. For MS Windows you may have trouble backing up open files. Dataprotecter and EMC Networker are good enterprise backup products but your business is going to pay for them.
There are other imaging solutions some free and others not free it depends on what you want and how much you wish to spend. As I have said before "Clonezilla" works for me and is very user friendly (IMHO) flexible but it may not work for you (test, test, test and test some more). I would not recommend Fedora 7 if you want a stable Linux machine but a distribution like Ubuntu. For Linux, MS Windows and Solaris I have found "Clonezilla" is excellent for saving and restoring images to/from a USB disk or network machine.
It is always a good idea to consider the system disk fundamental layout and this applies equally to MS Windows as it does to Linux/Unix since you only need to image this not the user data since that should be done under a backup. As for backing up over 1 TB of user data well that opens up a whole new can of worms and if you have that on a corporate laptop I would make sure it is not a collection of MP3's, avi's or anything that does not pertain to your work (read KingSkippus post for more info), one audit and you could be in big trouble.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
your laptop is simply a X terminal.
// arl
After having my 5th etc. laptop disk crash (all travelstars) i decided to run my laptop without any mechanical disk. This means just a simple Linux installation is running on Laptop and all the projects/work are in my server, which has backupping system.
Laptop disks were 60-100 GB, which consisted 95% of data and 5% OS code. The huge data amount is not easy to backup i noticed. Even though work was backupped the whole data collection and the structure was not, so after every disk crash meant heavy organizing of the new disk. I got tired and threw out the idea of having huge disk within my laptop.
My next target is having internal 8GB CF disk (through an adapter) to have OS. This will replace current dvd or usb stick based systems.
Currently running all applications using 54Mbit wifi and tunneling the traffic through ssh. What I noticed generally for example firefox is running faster through all the tunneling and wifi than on 1GHz+ Acer laptop running MS 2nd latest "OS".
Simpler. Human interaction. I get all laptop users in my small business to back up all user files overnight to external hard disc.
If no back up done for 24 hours, laptop will only start the backup program. Work stops but they learn to backup. Once per week external hard discs stored to our main hard disc storage via laptop when not a work day.
The human thing is if no working laptop, no pay! I.e log on having backed up is necessary to register a paid day of work.
Regards Eion MacDonald
iFfolder works great for us.
http://www.ifolder.com/
I am a software developer working for a consulting firm and I use my laptop for everything. Personally, I do all of my development in a Virtual PC, so backing up my work is as simple as copying the Virtual PC files to some other location. I actually use SyncToy to copy the Virtual PC to an external hard drive every couple of days. That external hard drive doesn't travel around with me. It stays safe and sound in my office at home.
I know that my approach isn't exactly the most elegant or "enterprise-class" answer, but it is easy to set up and works well for me. Plus, I get the added benefit that if I totally hose something up in one of my projects, I can just replace the Virtual PC with the last backup copy and try again.
This is probably not useful for the OP as it's a Linux/Unix only solution, but others might find it interesting.
I setup an OpenVPN access point for my whole business system infrastructure (on tcp port 443 for easy firewall circumvention) which is setup at a hosting company with a 100Mbp/s connection to the Internet. I access it through whatever connection I can get, the minimum being HSDPA (~1.2Mbit down, 128kbit up with my provider in France) when I'm on the go. Then I use rdiff-backup to transfer changes in a set of directories. The backup server uses a ssh key authorized for root login which means that the backup server can fully automate the backup process with no other configuration on the laptop than the installation of rdiff-backup and the publick ssh key.
On systems using databases, the backup server begins by asking to dump them in uncompressed form (compressed data breaks the rsync algorithms rdiff-backup uses and triggers whole file transfers) before the actual backup.
The whole laptop is backed up with some directories being left out. This allows me to be sure that only things I don't want backed up are not. The only thing I must keep in mind is to change the list of databases the backup system must be aware of when I add/remove them.
If you're using a Microsoft based network, you can just make their my documents be on the server. So that way everytime they log on to the network (within the network) they're my documents are tnere. But that would require you to tell them that they have to start saving stuff in their My Documents.
What, in order to back up windows clients I have to share the hard drives out on the network? I might as well install kazaa on the C: drives and rely on the internet to keep the backups for me in that case.
I know of a few thousand retail stores that run these things; external HDD connected via USB. Not real expensive, not real cheap -- but you press a button on the box and it backs up your drive. Would work a treat on a laptop.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
we use a combination of javascript and an internet backup product. Our javascript cabs up the databases and then it gets backed up to off site servers. FYI, check out http://www.your-data.co.uk/ - we found it really easy to use and does the job for us just fine. So far everything's been great, we've even had to do a restore a couple of times (users huh) without any issue.
If you run a diverse bunch of developers in many markets, using all kinds of different tools, you will not get them to use a source code control tool.
The easiest solution is to purchase twice the number of usb pen drives as you have laptops.
Each Friday, (or more often) everyone gives you their pen drive with their important data and you give them a blank.
During the week each pen drive is backed up to your safe storage and wiped. (You do have SOMEWHERE safe, don't you?)
You can automate the backups so you do not have to spend too much time on it, or get a flunky to do it for you.
Look at bacula (http://bacula.org). There is a windows binary client and source for linux, mac, unix, etc. I suggest setting up the bacula server to poll the laptop clients once each hour using a low backup/job priority. The lower priority will not stop normal backup jobs nor normal restore jobs, but if nothing else is going on it will check with the laptops to see if something has changed.
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/co ntinuous-data-protection/
Its great for laptops or remote machines that have transient network connectivity. Backs up (with sub file backup and versioning) transparently in the background and caches backups on local disk for when you are not connected to the network.
Works for CIFS, WebDAV and Tivoli Storage Manager backup destinations.
Give it a shot, the 30 day trial is fully functional.
I've been using it for a while now.
---
DISCLAIMER: I work for IBM / Tivoli.
...and you'll never get the users to manually stop the database.
I'd propose writing a log-in/log-out script that backs it up to the safest place you can find - local storage if off network, network storage if available. get the script to name the backup with the timestamp of when it was done - this way all you need to tell the users is "everytime you log off, it'll backup". Ric
...so share them out with permissions so that only the account that backuppc runs under can access them. For heavens sake.
Why should backups be bogging down their performance? Auto-schedule the backup for just after "business hours", and let them go home w/o having to take WORK with them.
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
For my Mac I like the backup software from Memeo called LifeAgent http://memeo.com/lifeagent.htm. It is a real time backup software. That means the software keeps track of the changes that I make and automatically backs them up when the destination volume is available (instantly or when the volume is remounted).
I like it because it is so simple to set up and very easy to use. Having my files backed up and protected is no longer a chore that I worry anymore. It looks like they have a Windows equivalent called Memeo AutoBackup. I haven't used the Windows version but I assume it's about the same.
I use mozy with my own key, but instead of a file I used a passphrase (just type it in when you setup your account instead of specifying a file). I've restored successfully several times, including from my old XP box to my new Vista box.
:)
The restore option isn't particularly bad, you have to decrypt the restore image (obviously as you encrypted it with your own key) but otherwise, its just like downloading a tarball of your backups.
They do have a shell extension now, right-click and browse the files you want restored, but I've never used that. It does appear to be as easy as you could want though.
So I recommend Mozy - its free so there's no problem if you want to try it out, and once you've proved to yourself that restore works its better than not having backups at all. (and, shameless self-promotion, if anyone wants to just try it please use this link as they'll give me a bit more storage space, not that I've used the quote I already have but I like the principle of free stuff
You don't have to explicitly share anything out... Use a windows administrative share... If it's for a business, chances are they've got an AD controller and you can use a domain admin account (or set the backuppc acct to be in the domain admin group) and connect straight to the root of the drive, then access whatever path you want on it...
Ok, so I didn't read the grandparent post before posting that, but the concept would be the same... BackupPC allows you to set different configuration profiles for each individual machine (that just override bits and pieces of the global configuration file, just the lines you need to override like username/password), so you can just use the local administrator username/password for that machine and connect to the administrative share for C$ or D$ on that machine, instead of having to make an actual visible share on the network...
Problem is, after "business hours", most laptops are shut off/in standby. It's hard to back up a machine that's not powered up.
On a related note, any backup solution that you implement for laptops MUST MUST MUST not be cancellable by the user. Sure, you can set things up for after hours work to minimize any loss of productivity, but if that user shuts off their laptop at 6 pm and doesn't power it up again until 9 the next day, when exactly should the backup run? It'll have to run during business hours, and some slowdown is inevitable (but can be minimized). If a user is sophisticated enough to end a process in Task Manager, he/she needs to be protected from themselves for the good of the organization.
I once had a support contract that included maintaining a Retrospect server to back up all the Macs in the organization (educational institution). We had an overpromoted PHB CTO who would not do ANYTHING to change his behavior regarding backups. In those days broadband was not widely available, and WiFi had ever even been heard of; a 128k ISDN line was the most anyone had. This required that the laptop be on the network long enough to complete the backup. Time and time again, he would be educated regarding the need for the laptop to be on the network and powered up long enough for the backup to happen, but would not listen; he received warnings on the laptop regarding backup status as being incomplete, and completely disregarded them. He insisted that doing so would inconvenience him, and as we all know, this is a disaster on par with a 8.5 level earthquake. We also tried the USB-drive-at-home approach, but we all knew for a fact that he would NEVER use it, as again, it represented an inconvenience. To top it all off, he was EXTREMELY hard on his laptop, to the point where after 8 or 9 months it was beaten up (physically) to the point of no longer functioning. Seriously, it looked like someone had run over it with a truck. Five times. Needless to say, data loss was a near certainty, but his attitude was that it was our problem, not his, and we needed to figure out something else (despite the fact that it was very nearly impossible). Of course, should he lose things on his laptop, it was completely OUR fault, and frequently his drives would be sent to recovery to the tune of thousands of taxpayer dollars.
I wish you luck with trying to back up these laptops. Hopefully you will not have anyone to support like that dipshit. The ubiquity of broadband should make your life a lot easier.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
I suggest you check out secura backup -> http://www.securabackup.com/
This program does full, partial and incremental backup, and can transfer the shit anywhere (can back up to zips, then ftp them, for example).
This might make your life much easier.
We do file synchronization of all our network files, and encourage users to store business-critical information on the network, with offline access if the user wants/needs to work from home. Additionally, we've created a group policy that remaps the user's My Documents folder to a network path, so this information is backed up as a part of our server backup procedures. Additionally, our engineers store their code in subversion, so any local copies of code are (in theory) stored on our server as well. This seems to cover most scenarios adequately. In about 2 years of working for this company, I've never had a major catastrophe where a user was not able to recover important files due to a lack of local machine backup.
BackupPC tries to copy a file only once by using md5sum to help determine uniqueness of the file. It then uses Linux's file linking to link multiple copies of the same file to one source of data on the drive. The idea is that you can create a snapshot of the entire drive every 5 minutes and only have to store the space for the original plus the changed files.
Unfortunately, BackupPC uses Windows file sharing to copy the data and Windows locks files. Meaning that Windows will make locked files unavailable for reading/ copying. That means missing critical files within c:\windows and the open database files will be missed. To get around this issue, you could always create an on-drive flat-file backup of the database and copy that file when the laptop is connected.
This system works better on backing up Linux systems because of the native rsync support and handling of locked files.
BackupPC is a great tool and has a nice interface where users can recover their own data based on the time of the backup, but you also need to know it's weaknesses.
With current de-duplication methodology you could get one backup image of the laptop while it is in the office and from that point forward backups could occur over a VPN connection because only changes would be transmitted.
There are numerous providers that offer de-duplication including Symantec (Netbackup), Quantum, Data Domain, Diligent and Sepaton. You might be able to justify replacing your entire backup solution as any of these would improve backup storage as well as enabling backing up laptops remotely. There might be some free versions out there somewhere as well.
I agree with several other posters that loss of the laptop itself and encryption of the data is just as important as data backup/recover.
I'm currently backing up almost 1TB of user data on less then 1/2 of that in physical disk space (about 300gb).
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2007/06/01
http://www.techworld.com/storage/features/index.cf m?featureid=2976
It also lists the major providers of the solutions. Avamar (now owned by EMC) and DataDomain offer a software only solution that may be the most cost effective if you can provide the storage.
Our users with laptops don't keep any of their files on the system... for that matter, neither do most of our users with desktops.
Our laptop users log into terminal services through any Internet connection they want, access their files through a fileserver mapped to "My Documents", and access SQL as a system DSN. We encourage them to use their laptops and systems for checking Outlook and browsing the Internet when the need arises, but Terminal Services handles our remote file issues very well.
Menus: Linux=function, Windows=vendor, OS X=as little as possible. Makes a statement, don't you think?
If you are a Windows only shop... take a look at http://www.cubeglobalstorage.com/
Cheers, Sven.
with the company i work for (50 on site salesmen with verizon air cards) we use a vpn solution, offline files, and a solution called asigra. its an off site backup system (little pricy) but its all offsite, and the compression is amazing. we have about 1tb of data across 13 servers that gets backed up.
our off site data usage is right about 400gb with the compression.
Have you ever read the terms of service of the wireless companies internet plans? If they find out that you are using the service for a VPN or work-type connection, they can cut off your service at any time without telling you. Sprint doesn't explicitely say that you can't use it for VPNs, but I've had a few laptop customers say they've been cut off for that. Verizon explicitely says in TOS that you cannot VPN. ATT says that you can connect to corporate networks in their "Permissible Uses" but the "Prohibited Uses" section seems to indicate otherwise.
They really just need to set up a repository for each project [...] and just back up the repositories.
Okay. Can I call you when all the work in my sandboxes goes *poof*? How about my data? Or related reports? Or e-mail archives?
Backing up the repositories is critical, but is rarely sufficient by itself.
I helped small business recently to setup all their laptops with Foldershare (free). These laptops now sync with each other and also with a office server that is running the same program. Users are educated to only work on files within the shared directories and weekly backups are run off the backup server in the office.
This way, anytime the user is online (in the office or out in the field), the sync service ensures that files are being copied to other laptops as well as the office server.
Foldershare seems to do ok with open files, but I am not sure how it will handle MSDE data files. It also has some limites on file size and the number of files per library, but it may be a good solution for smaller clients.
I put Novell's iFolder in place for this a few years back... worked for Win and Linux/UNIX system alike. Very low bandwidth after the initial sync...
If you are already using NetBackup or BackupExec on your servers, just extend what you are doing with the Desktop/Laptop Agent. I use it at home with BExec 10 and it works well for my wife's laptop, it syncs when she is at home. I work for a very large bank, and we use it a bit with NetBackup. For the most part we forbid any data to leave the datacenter, but that is up to each company to determine their risk/profit tolerance.
- Compression and encryption of data prior to sending it to the server.
- One copy backup - if a file already exists on the server, the client notes that fact and doesn't send another copy to the server.
- Email optimization - like the last feature, Connected will scan your inbox for duplicate emails so that when your email happy receptionist sends a copy of her latest puppy pictures to everyone in the company, only one copy gets sent to the Connected Servers.
These are only a few of the cool features that sold us on this tool. The end result is that qhen backups occur, even over slow networks, the backup lasts mere minutes and are opportunistic (they'll back up as much as possible when they detect network and pick up where they left off the next time.)Let me reinforce many of the points made in this thread. Disk encryption is critical for laptops. Version control is essential for engineering teams (for non open source, check out True Blue Software's SnapShotCM (http://www.truebluesoftware.com/)). Hope this helps!
FYI, BackupPC can use rsync for Windows as well; you just need to install rsync on your Windows PCs.
:}
Oh, and that was supposed to be GB, not MB
A simple solution is to have a batch file installed on each laptop. The laptop owner then runs this batch file periodically which does a *.* copy of all files in selected directories and zips them then saves this zip file to a network drive.
Simple solution. There's a bit of user involvement though in the files must be stored in designated directories on the laptop hard drive and the batch needs to be run manually, though you could have it run at a certain time each day.
http://www.mozypro.com/
I am not affiliated with the company in any way. Remote backup with strong encryption. I use their personal backup and I have been very happy with it.
I don't dictate whether they take their laptops home. Some of these guys are workaholics that can't live without their computers at their side 24/7. Also, we are working with international partners in several different time zones, so, "business hours" can be all over the place. Lots of travel is involved, as well. The times when the laptops are powered on, connected to the network, and not in use are completely unpredictable. That's kinda the point of this Slashdot story - how do you do backups for that scenario?
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
is...You do not backup laptops, or desktops. You use ODBC connections to SQL Servers for databases, or to VMWare machines which you can crash and rebuild in minutes. No workstation backups!!!!
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
The best way to go is to do centralized backups. Where I work we at told to and setup to use a central folder for all business work. Our "My Computer" is mapped to this folder, so it is that much easier. We have a script that checks the backup status when a user logs in. If it is older than a certian date then the script runs. It will allow to be canceled, until it is a certian time from the last successful backup, then it needs to run. This is really just a copy to the users home drive so, in case it is needed it, is ready to be restored. I think robocopy is the main utility it uses. This works great and the only downside is the space needed on the server(s).
Look, at some point the laptops much connect to a storage facility (i.e.: the 'Net).
Find a backup program that can use Volume Shadow Copy to back up SQL Server databases incrementally and set that program to run. Ensure that your consultants leave the laptop on and connected for a period each day to allow the backup to happen. We're using Backup for Workgroups from Lockstep Systems which is capable of effectively restoring the entire system, settings and all.
Perform the initial backup while the laptop is directly connected and then make sure that they are running their nightlies when they're off-site. This can't be stressed enough though: no backup system for laptops will function correctly if the laptop user does not do their part. The weakest link in the chain will likely be the laptop user, so regulations on their behaviour must be severely enforced or all good plans will go to waste.
I was going to suggest BackupPC also.
/dev/md/1 1.4T 526G 780G 41% / /dev/md/0 99M 22M 72M 24% /boot
/proc/mdstat
:)
I've used it for both small and large installations. Here's an example of one I've been working on for the last few weeks. We've slowly been adding machines in, to conserve bandwidth.
From the host summary page:
There are 54 hosts that have been backed up, for a total of:
82 full backups of total size 1375.75GB (prior to pooling and compression),
280 incr backups of total size 730.47GB (prior to pooling and compression).
root @ silo (/root) df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
root @ silo (/root) cat
Personalities : [linear] [raid0] [raid1] [raid10] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [multipath]
md1 : active raid5 sdd2[3] sdc2[2] sdb2[1] sda2[0]
1464573504 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/4] [UUUU]
md0 : active raid1 sdd1[3] sdc1[2] sdb1[1] sda1[0]
104320 blocks [4/4] [UUUU]
unused devices:
The big thing to remember when backing up Windows machines is that there are files that you can't back up directly. MSSQL and the Windows Registry are the ones that come to mind immediately. It's easy to get around that though. Export them nightly, and then you can safely back up those exports.
The best thing to do is set up and start the backups, and then restore to another machine. If you can get to everything you wanted to, you know it's a good backup.
I like the fact that BackupPC is done on hard drives, so it has immediate access to the saved data. I've gone picking and choosing different versions of files in the past. Oh, was yesterday's incremental what I wanted? Nope. Lets go back another day. Nope. Oh, 3 days ago had the right data. Good. That only takes a few seconds, and is a lot better than waiting for tapes to spool through.
We're backing BackupPC to tape, so we have that extra level of security. But since it's on a RAID5, we don't worry too much about the drive dying.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I bought each of the sales group a small USB disk drive and let 'em do their own. They won't bother to dump to the servers when they're in the office so this way they can do it at home or on the road at night. If they don't and they lose something, they're the ones who might miss a commission.
Greed is a good incentive. Actually it's about the only thing that works with that bunch.
- Use bootcfg to edit boot.ini to add in the safe mode switch - msconfig is your friend to find the switch
- Add a registry entry to run your script on startup, probably HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce. You need something special in the entry name (maybe "*"? don't remember) to make it run in safe mode.
- Modify your script to undo the boot.ini change and the registry change
- Modify your script as per step 7-9
- Reboot
- Your script will run
- Your script will run another command that spawns a child process then exits
- The child process will wait for the window that says "you're booting into safe mode, click ok to contiune"
- The child process will click the OK button, wait a minute to let everything settle down, then reboot.
Step 7 is important, since startup processes seem to run serially and the messagebox won't show up until the main process terminates. After that, the only problem is you have to click the "OK" button that warns you that you're booting into safe mode before you can reboot. I think I used AutoIt when I wrote a safemode script for cleaning spyware, it's bulky just for a "click a button" script, but it's insanely easy to use.Do the laptops ever make it back to the home office and connect to the network? If so, how often?
Do the laptop users have the option of creating a VPN tunnel back to the home network?
If they're coming in via VPN, how fast is the uplink speed of that connection? Does it vary?
How much data are we talking about?
Is there an in-house server available at the home office to replicate this data to?
Are you working within a specific budget?
One thing he OP did point out is that they're backing up data to an MSDE database and that there are also files that should be backed up. That said, it would be safe to assume that a database is live and running and, as such, would require backup software that can handle open files and/or SQL databases. SQL servers, themselves, have the ability to replicate data from one server to another. This should probably be the first thing you check and try.
Assuming that the laptop users know how to stop the database services so that the database files are not locked, you can use just about any backup software you want. iFolder works really well. It makes copies like rsync so only the deltas are uploaded, not the whole file that has changed. It can also encrypt the data once it's on the server, but I don't think it encrypts the data before it's sent over the wire.
The amount of data can be an issue as well. Making a copy of a customers' database while on their network can be quite fast. However, taking that copied data and replicating it over a WAN link, depending on how much data there is, can take a long time. Perhaps having them keep an external hard disk and making another backup to it would be beneficial until the data can be backed up at the HQ.
An external drive isn't always a viable solution, either. The road warrior will, most likely, keep the external drive in the same bag as his laptop. If one is lost/stolen, chances are the other will be lost/stolen at the same time, thus making that type of data protection useless. It will only be useful for the road warrior in the event that his laptop hard disk crashes or the OS will not boot. I would highly suggest staying away from the built-in Windows "Make available offline" feature. I had a handful of users using this feature at a past company I worked for. The original file server crashed. We were in the process of bringing up a new file server. Rather than reviving the old server, we restored data from tape to the new server. The new server had a new hostname and the built-in Windows "Make available offline" didn't know how to handle it. Data that users modified offline could not sync up. Another thing to note is Microsoft doesn't support making network data (data on a file server) available offline, especially if more than one person makes the same folder available offline. It also flat-files all data making it next to impossible to know where the original file resided. This was back in Windows 2000. I'm not sure if Windows XP is any different. There are plenty of options out there. You just need to consider what is best given what you have to work with. Lay out what you have, what you can get, and what your limitations are... then build upon that.
Here where i am employed and in charge of IT. I use a software solution that a previous co-worker wrote. Its fully secure, fully avalibale from anywhere. And has never let me down for the last 4 years. Free 30 day trial. Feel free to contact the president with any questions about functionality and or back ground processes.. I have this software instalaled on over 15 machines. http://www.virtualtapedrive.com/Default.htm great software.. brant betcher bettendorf ia
I've used rsyncd very successfully with BackupPC. There are still some things that don't work quite right, thanks to the way Windows behaves, but it's all avoidable.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Retrospect is alive and well, too. We have some exciting strategic plans and we're hiring senior engineers with system software experience.
Retrospect is well suited to the poster's issue. It has "proactive" backup for intermittently connected laptops, SQL backup, strong encryption and many other features that -- whoops, </sales-pitch>.
or try rsnapshot.org, I'm using it succesfully.
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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'Small Business' hmm, welll, I have seen very small setups of the following, although they were for big business, so they could probably just absorb some of the cost but I'm not a costs and stuff type person. but still, try looking into the possibility of using Tivoli Storage Manager, with adaptive subfile differencing and 'incremental forever' policy (no full backups other than backup No. 1, TSM will track deleted/moved files, enabling it to 'build' a picture of a f/s at a given date and then recover a f/s to that state) The biggest problem I have seen with laptop backups though, is people turning them off because they slow their machine way down, or alternatley people just not doing them if left to their choice when to backup. If you can get these people to keep valuable data in a central place (cvs/svn repo's, Databases servers for db's) and back that up, it should make you feel warmer and fuzzier..
Darwin Hawking Blackmore
We use rdiff-backup to automatically backup our laptops (all running Ubuntu Linux) onto a server at our office each day. Similarly, as the director, I maintain a server at home and my laptop backs up there each night. For those that don't know, rdiff-backup uses the rsync algorithm to create a mirror of your laptop's drive on another machine. It checks any files that differ between the source (laptop) and the destination (mirror on server). Rdiff-backup goes one step further, keeping the diffs of older versions of each file for as long as instructed so that you can also recreate older versions of any backed up file!
/proc --exclude /tmp --exclude /mnt --exclude /sys --exclude /dev/bus --exclude '**/.mozilla' --exclude **/.thunderbird --exclude **/.mozilla-thunderbird --exclude **/cache*
To avoid backing up invalid/troublesome/cache files, these are the excludes we use: --exclude
For a 100GB laptop drive (nearly full) a daily rdiff-backup run takes about 20 minutes and is triggered by cron automatically. We've got a script which determines which network the laptop is on and backs up to the relevant server.
Rdiff-backup runs on any Linux with a reasonably up-to-date python implementation and rsync library. I believe it's also available for OS X and there's another client for Windows, but I'm not sure what it's called. Or you can run it with cygwin...
I'm on a small technical team of 30 people and we use DriveImage XML(http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm) to do out laptop backups.
Each of us has our own external USB 2.5" HD around 120GB.
This backup tool is only supported on Windows.
A backup of my 60GB drive was around 20GB.
The external USB drive has a boot partition w/ the software that you can boot from, to restore the image.
Saving images can be done on the fly while the system is running, which is another added benefit.
also the image files are viewable since its all XML.
(nope, don't work for them - but i love it!). uses amazon's s3 online storage system. super cheap, automated backups. jungledisk.com. i've got multiple systems all backing up to the same amazon account using jungledisk. you can map a drive so that all machines can view the same files. works on linux, mac, win.
mkm
SVN is fine for binary files. At least, it's a hell of a lot better then SourceOffSite / Visual SourceSafe ever was. Now, putting multi-gigabyte binary files into a VCS system is typically a bad idea, unless the VCS is specifically designed for it. But for binary files up to a few hundred megabytes, SVN will do just fine.
And I agree that developers who don't use version control is a major WTF.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Acronis TrueImage 10 now has the ability to e-mail log files.
Second Copy 7 also has notification ability (I think...), but it may require running a command after the job finishes.
We use both in our small office. A pair of external USB drives, periodic images using Acronis and hourly backups with Second Copy 7. Second Copy is very good at only copying stuff that changed, so it can run in the background with hardly any slowdown.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
The problem with procedures people HAVE TO FOLLOW is that they STILL DO NOT FOLLOW THEM.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Yes, version control is not a general purpose backup solution unless you're using something like ZFS. On the other hand, the submitter specifically mentioned that he was most worried about losing client data, which was presumably used for development.
If your project depends on a specific file, that file belongs in your working directory/hierarchy. As such, it belongs in your repository.
Sandboxes/virtual machines/environments/interpreters are not a special case. If your project depends on a particular version or difficult to create construct, that version or construct should end up in version control. If you're thorough, you'll end up with a repository of fully functional programming environments. This is a big time saver, analogous to using virtualized images, but with much less overhead.
Take a look at the SonicWALL CDP 1440i. It is designed for small businesses looking for easy to manage backup. http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/08/17/34TCsoni c_1.html
As a bonus, it can also back up to an online storage center.
Build a storage server with ftp and use Cobian. It has 256bit encryption too. If you are looking for a cheap storage solution you can look at Buffalo Terabytes. For about 1000 bucks you can get a 2TB server. At terastation.org there are hacks to install NFS and good stuff. http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm (Cobian is Free) http://www.buy.com/prod/buffalo-terastation-pro-ii -network-attached-storage-2-0-tb-2-usb-2-0/q/loc/1 01/204038588.html
http://terastation.org/wiki/Main_Page
Buffalo Terastation is RAID capable.
Hope this helps.
Nav
I cant speak for Verizon or AT&T, but Sprint actively markets these to business users, and actively market it as a way to VPN into your home company when mobile.
At least for the dedicated data cards (EVDO revA) and unlimited data plans from Sprint, this is the case.
This happens because Offline Files marks the entire server offline if it decides it cant contact it, so if your print queues are there too, then those go offline as well. But if your print queues are on a different box, then this doesnt happen.
This is also only true in 2000 and XP. Not marking the entire server offline is one of the improvements made in Vista's offline files.
True, so true...but at least when they don't, it's their ass that gets fired, not yours.
You should work on establishing a backup policy. There are many companies that can help with policy, implementation and maintenance. Lucid offers such services. In addition, their LBackup software supports encrypted transport and storage of data over a wired or wireless networks.
Unless it's, say, the CEO's laptop that gets lost. Then (s)he'll say "Why the fuck isn't backup automated?" and fire your ass.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Aha, there's my confusion. They really didn't like it with rev0 - in my area revA is just now available (only on the new pocket PC device).
Have you tried that over a low bandwidth connection, say something like a DSL line with say 128kB up? Over a VPN?
Besides my normal engineering tasks i do some IT support in a small company with only one full time IT administrator. We are 50 employees , and are physically located in three different locations. We have something like 35 laptops 20 desktops and 10 servers. Everything is backed up by a software called DMUS. The cool thing about it is that it backs up everything on ALL machines - but only keeps one copy of duplicate files. It runs in the background on every machine and you only notices a small freeze when it needs to backup the registry. It discovers machines when they are on the network and starts doing backup. We have used it for over a year and are really happy with it. The company that makes it have recently been acquired by some venture capital firm , so i don't know where the development is going. And the name has changed. But check it out - it works for us ! http://www.r2software.com/
So now your machines have no security on their Documents and Settings folder? Or do you somehow magically restore all the permissions afterwards?
All that would be needed here is the administrator accout or am I completely missing the point of this question?
yep I did damn replying to a post at 2:30 AM anyway I'll answer your question correctly this time I think.... You can flag folders that they inherit from the parent. So if you turn that option on it will inherit the permission from what ever folder you placed it, i.e Placing a folder in C:\Documents and Settings\Joe.Smoo would update the permissions needed to view something in that folder, making it viewable to that user only because its deriving the permission from the parent object
--Hey, thanx for that - I didn't even know about clonezilla. DL'ed it and will be trying it out on a VM. :)
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== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
I was trying to have my wife's Vista Home Premium back up to my XP machine (RAIDed). The share is available for read/write but the Vista backup program wants an account, I have tried "Administrator" as well as a new backup group account on the XP machine but no joy. This is just a workgroup environment, no domain.
Anyone played this game and won?
Thanks,
Bod
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
If not simple file synch, you could always go with an alienware laptop and put a mirror in there (Alienware 9700 make a good desktop replacement but I wouldnt want to lug it around if I traveled often) and you get to have 2 hard drives as raid 1 or 0.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?