Ask Slashdot: Open Source Back-Up Tool For Business?

New submitter xerkot writes: I am looking for a tool to make backups of PCs in a big company. We want to replace the one that we are using at this moment for this new one. The tool will be used to do backups of PCs (mainly Windows, and a few Linux), and we want to manage these backups centrally from a console, being able to automatize the backup process. The servers of the company are backed up with another tool, so they are out of scope. In the company we are being encouraged more and more to use open source software, so I would like to ask you, what are best open source tools to do backups of PCs? Are they mature enough for a big company?

Comments

What exactly are you backing up?

[i.r.id10t]

What exactly are you backing up? Entire disk images? Or just user files?

If disk images, then something like clonezilla, perhaps set up to boot from a TFTP server. Boot the machine via WOL, kick off the TFTP, automatically dump the image out to a server using the machine name or MAC address or something as a unique identifier

For user files only (ie, My Documents or whatever) can you set up network based home directories ? And then just back up the server they live on.

amanda

[Anonymous Coward]

you can use amanda in case you want to backup files. amanda is production grade and has clients for windows and linux and
possibly unix alike. -- mallah

Re:amanda

[rklrkl]

Amanda is great if you're backing up only Linux clents, but the Windows Amanda client is a total abomination. Not been updated in over 2 years (don't believe the version numbering - check the timestamp of setup.exe), pointlessly uses a MySQL DB on the client side (ridiculous!) which the Linux client *or* server doesn't use, regularly times out, regularly crashes, produces byzantine error codes without any description/documentation of them, much slower than the equivalent Linux client and produces ZIP64 backups that are pretty well impossible to extract from on Linux (which is annoying, because the Amanda server side is Linux-only).

We have a Ultrium tape drives with multi-slot autoloaders/barcodes, so there are very few Open Source backup solutions that can handle this (including tape-spanning if needed) out-of-the-box. Bacula was another potential solution, but it's horrific to set up (makes the dreadful Oracle DB install process look like a breeze) - just reading the Bacula install docs brings me out in a cold sweat :-) I guess business-level backups just aren't sexy enough to warrant a decent Open Source solution...

Don't cut corners

[cloud.pt]

I once was in a crossroads of choosing between stuff like Clonezilla and Bacula, for small business purposes. Bottom line is they add a lot of complexity for low to no flexibility. I ended up building my own tar/move/ script with cron triggers at after ours downtime, then I would simply move them around network locations for avoiding single points of failure messing up the backups. Adding your own exceptions for the backup is a plus. At the last point, I had something reliable, fast, and that would require the simple overhead of re-installing Debian before the actual restore, then an update-grub and a change in fstab for the new disk replacing the broken one's UUID (because you don't really do that many restores so it's a fair trade-off, while you do save time exponentially by not backing up the entire OS). A good starting point is http://www.aboutdebian.com/tar...

Amanda and S3

[mi]

Use AMANDA to do the back-ups. Use Amazon's S3 to actually store the dumps compressed and encrypted at the source — AMANDA has had the S3 back-end for a while. No, you do not need "Amanda Enterprise".

Having set just such a thing up at my last job, I'd be happy to help you out for a regular consulting fee. Should not take more than a week or two even on a large organization.