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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?"
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 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.
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.
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 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
It is regrettable that SuperDuper doesn't support encrypted backup targets.
2) Efficiency. While I don't know SuperDuper, I assume it clones the entire drive. This seems like a waste of time for a few changed files. An incremental backup would be much faster and more efficient with maybe full backups weekly.FYI, it does do incremental backups, but they can be a bit slower than rsync, mainly because it does a bunch of tests when copying. The main appeal of SuperDuper! is that it copies everything, including alternate data streams on files (a big deal for us OSXers sometimes), extended FS attributes, and files that OS X would otherwise not allow you to, making the backup drive fully blessable and essentially indistinguishable from the original.
I am a happy SuperDuper! user as well, my only gripe is that it lack the encryption and the ability to do "snapshots" of different versions of the filesystem -- though the latter is likely to be addressed by Time Machine.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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
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.
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.
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
Unison is an excellent rsync-frontend with a nice gui for synchronization without the "grinding halt"... http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/