Small-Office Windows Based Backup Software?

Billhead asks: "My boss purchased a Quantum SDLT220 tape backup drive for our few computers in the office, and I have been put in charge of maintaining the backups. The only prior backup experience I have is with my home networks using Python scripts. We don't have any special needs, just encryption and scheduling. Our original backup software isn't compatible with the SDLT220, and other backup software we have tried have been horrible (unable to decrypt backups, memory leaks, unstable network backups). What does the Slashdot community use for small office backups?"

EMC/Legato Networker

I've been using Legato (now EMC) Networker at a number of different sites for over ten years now. It's easy, reliable, and supports a wide range of hardware. It scales well, but can get quite expensive when you start adding large autoloaders into the mix.

Their site [emc.com] should get you started. They'll set you up with a media kit and 45 day demo licenses if you request one.

What kind of backups will you be doing?

I don't really have a comment on which software to use for Small Office Backups, but we use CommVault QiNetix and we are very happy with it. But, we use a fibre attached SpectaLogic T50 which is way overkill for a small office setup. One of the questions you need to answer is this:

• Will you be doing backups for disaster recovery? Meaning, you won't really worry about keeping data for long periods of time as long as you have a good backup for a month or so?
• Or will you be doing backups for file restoration? Will you be needing to always recover that MS Excel document that Sally from accounting deleted 6 months ago?

Once you have that question answered, search for a backup software that fits your needs. You may look into CommVault, i'm not sure how it's priced for the regular consumer market (we're a .edu).

Acronis...

Since big hard drives are relatively cheap, rotating external hard drives and using Acronis [acronis.com] might do the trick.

Re:

And a nice hot fire will destroy your data. Any backup solution should consider periodic off-site storage of media.

Until they roll out cheap 40+ gig solid state media, I'm sticking with tape. It's easy to move and I wont faint if it's dropped.

Re:

My experience with small shops (ones that don't have an in-house IT department) is that they wont back up regularly if too many steps are involved.

I haven't done contract work in about 5 years -- but I used to set up servers to backup to tape, spit out the

External HDD

Most of the small setups I've done have a RAID for storage and an external HDD for backup. In my experience, most tape drives are slow, cumbersome and expensive. These days, a big external HDD is cheaper and a lot easier to work with on today's OS's. Agreed, this solution may not be what works best with older OS's (we have an old IBM AIX machine here that houses our main software, ick).

Windows-run servers are easy; most external HDD come with backup software. On the last one I did, the external HDD (Seagate, I think) came with the "one touch" feature. I just set the software to backup a specific shared folder (small workgroup, public storage; it's for a small newspaper), and all the lady has to do is bring the drive in, plug it in and push the button.

A *NX solution I used before was to write a simple shell script to mount an external HDD and tar.gz the appropriate directories to it for that day. The script can either be run manually or set up in cron.

But, all-in-all, research and experience is the best tool in finding what works best for your solution. I just don't like tapes. :)

Images

I have a group that uses an old disk imaging software set (Ghost Corp 7) to dump client disks to a server every weekend, then they dump the files to tape. If you have access to an imaging software product like Ghost Corp 7 (the Symantec abominations suck), I'd suggest setting up an older server as the backup system (and include the tape drive), then dump the clients and your main server to the backup server. Leave the images on the backup server HDD for fast restores, and use the tapes for offsite backups. This system has worked quite well for a couple of years.

Script It! Just use tar and gzip

I used tar and gzip glued together with command line PHP to manage a tape library. Worked fine for years.

Re:

Do you have a copy of the script? I could do with that for the server I'm building right now.

Our office is so small....

...that someone will always have it's eyes on my screen. So... no need to back, just have to ask somebody what I was writting or reading.

Bacula

Bacula [bacula.org]

2.0.0 has just been released, with pretty much full support for Windows. It doesn't have a pretty GUI, but it should be able to do what you want. It does support VSS so it can back up Exchange and SQL for you, and i'm working on an agent to do proper backups of SQL too, and hope to add Exchange support after that.

Re:

I second this. Bacula v2.0.0 also adds encryption support via openssl and a number of other goodies like a web-based interface to look at previous backups and schedules. It also supports pre- and post-backup scripts so we can do things like near-live MySQL

2 Bright Sparks' SyncBackSE

I set up 2 Bright Sparks' product SyncBackSE for a relative, a few months ago. I needed something in a hurry, and that could be "click the button simple" for them. (It offers a lot of configuration options, but appears to have some decent defaults and al

Re:

I'll second that. SyncBack is top notch and dead simple. The price is well within any small business budget, and simple enough for just about anyone to set up for manual backups or scheduled.

These should work for you

They even come in "Electrifying colors". http://www.superwarehouse.com/Imation_3.5_Neon_Fl o ppy_for_PC_(10_pk)/11916/p/47954 [superwarehouse.com]

ClarkConnect Linux and Bacula

We do small business consulting and when a client can't afford backup exec or retrospect(neither of which I like) I just make a old box a ClarkConnect Linux box and run backups via Bacula. CC has a web interface for backups, and similar functionality to backup exec, with clients for storage, and backup clients. I.e. you can run Bacula client on a windows machine and then backup that machine remotely without sharing its files, and you can run a backup file server on your windows machine without it being a smb share. I suppose you could get this functionality with any version of Linux, but I like that the end users have a web interface, should they need it. plus I'm not the worlds best Linux guy, and it is super simple to setup. oh, bacula supports most tape drives, but I've never really tried it with them, external hard drives are way cheaper, and easier to use than tape these days. if you don't have a spare machine around, setup vmware server and just run a virtual linux box. sounds a little odd, but it works great.

BackupAssist

It [backupassist.com] is cheap ($147) and supports the native NTBackup format.

Lose WINDOWS on the file/backup server...

Use roaming profiles and map the My Documents off to a home directory on a Linux box.

Use the tapedrive to back up the linux box.

Options to check out...

NovaBACKUP (PC World Best Buy; offers tape encryption)
http://www.novastor.com/ [novastor.com]

Cleversafe (GPL'd)
http://www.cleversafe.org/ [cleversafe.org]

Genie Backup Manager
http://www.genie-soft.com/products/gbm/default.htm l?AfID=13778 [genie-soft.com]

SyncBack (freeware)
http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html [2brightsparks.com]

EMC Insignia Retrospect (formerly Dantz Retrospect; PC Magazine Editor's Choice)
http://www.emcinsignia.com/products/ [emcinsignia.com]

tar and several removeable drives

While tar may or may not be available (or useable) under Microsoft Windows, you might want to consider one pitfal when using tapes for backups: if the office burns down and you lose your tape drive, unless you keep a spare drive offsite you now have a box of useless tapes until you can find and purchase a new tape drive that can read them. The advantage of removeable drives in this case is you can plunk them into any PC and get at the data right away.

Most unreliable software category: Backup software

For the last 15 years, before Windows 95 even, backup software has been some of the worst, most unreliable software commonly used. As far as I know, there are no good solutions.

Tips based on our experience:

Symantec seems scary, due to the number of very serious failures that have been reported over the years, and due to the character of the company:

1. Symantec Ghost is not the same software Ghost was previously. Symantec bought PowerQuest's DeployCenter and relabeled it Ghost, without making that clear in ads. That showed zero respect for their original Ghost product; in my experience the disrespect was deserved.
2. There seems to be a social breakdown at Symantec. The company seems to have far too few people with technical knowledge.
3. My experience is that Symantec technical support is abusive; abusiveness seems to be a major managerial method there. It is difficult to defend against many small abuses, as both Microsoft and Karl Rove (Bush's brain) know very well. (Abusers tend to learn by watching each other, even though they may not know each other.)

Acronis TrueImage is generally accepted as the best backup software for small businesses now. However:

1. The TrueImage software is not able to make encrypted backups; it can only password protect, a protection that is easily broken. So, don't allow anyone to take backup media off site. Store backups in a secure vault on site.
2. We have had many, many problems with unreliability of Acronis software. A scheduled backup may not actually run, for example. Recent versions have been more reliable.
3. The command line interface of TrueImage WorkStation seemed full of bugs when it was first released. Apparently the release was far too soon.
4. Acronis technical support amazes even me. I sent a notice of a failure in a new version. About 3 months later, I got a nonsense reply from someone who sounded like she was about 21 years old and only working for Acronis so that she could find a man, get pregnant, and stay home.
5. Acronis sales people seem to believe that anyone with technical knowledge is socially inferior. My experience is that they seem to think that dirtying their little brains with technical details is beneath their exalted place in society. When you ask for help, you may get some action that seems to be part of internal political maneuvering.
6. Acronis recently released an "update" that changed TrueImage installations to a new product name called TrueImage Home. Apparently this is an attempt to intimidate customers to pay for the Workstation version which is far more expensive.

Some ugly history of backup software: Hewlett-Packard's tape backup software would, during restore, make hundreds of zero-length files in random places. The names of the files would be taken from the names of legitimate files on the tape. HP technical support thought that was not a particularly bad problem.

In the DOS days, a company called Fifth Generation Systems sold a product called Fastback. The product was excellent until it was sold to a former banker who put his daughter in charge of marketing. (I talked to him for about 45 minutes on the telephone one day.) Since the banker didn't have any technical knowledge, and didn't believe that was important, and since the technical people left when the banker bought the company, the product quickly fell behind, became useless, and disappeared from the marketplace.

More notes about backup software.

Here are more notes to go with my parent comment:

Disk Image backups are required to back up the operating system drive. Disk Image backups are sector-by-sector backups. Some people call that operating system cloning or disk cloning [wikipedia.org]. There is a free Linux/Unix utility called DD [wikipedia.org]. DD has a Windows version [chrysocome.net], too. My understanding is that DD has no compression, so that the backups are much larger than with commercial software that compresses the images.

Microsoft has made Windows XP difficult to back up. It is necessary to have 3rd party software that can back up the operating system and also files that are in use. Windows XP will not allow copy, xcopy, or robocopy backups of the system registry for, example. For that you must have drive imaging software like Acronis TrueImage or another.

If a user forgets to close all programs, some important files may still be loaded at night and in use when backups are scheduled. That's why it is necessary to be able to back up files that are in use. Microsoft provides the API to do that, but very limited backup software called NTBackup.

Tip: Encryption is necessary. Backups that are not encrypted are somewhat useless, since it is too risky to take them off site. Remember that password protection is not encryption.

Be careful about backup software that a big company bought from some other company. When that happens, usually the technical people are fired and the company that buys the rights is not prepared technically to respect what the fired people have done. Microsoft bought rights to NTBackup from Veritas. My understanding is that Veritas bought it from Conner and Conner bought it from Arcada.

Recently Symantec bought [zdnet.com] Veritas. My experience with Symantec is that their software often has huge bugs, and their telephone support is possibly close to the worst.

I found this confused-looking but extensive list of Windows backup software: Backup Software For Windows 2000 [searchnetonline.com]

I'm suprised Amanda hasn't been mentioned yet.

Especially as it claims to be "The Most Popular Open Source Backup and Recovery Software"

http://amanda.zmanda.com/ [zmanda.com]

I'd be interested to read what any of it's users think of it in comparison to commercial apps.

GrpA.

Praise for AMANDA

We run AMANDA in our small setup. It is fantastic. The scheduler is quite sophisticated & backing up to tar makes disaster recovery easy. Not having to purchase client licenses is also a big plus

I've used Retrospect. It was "O.K.," but the above re

Backup Links

Try these:

G4U

http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/ [feyrer.de]

Cobian

http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm [educ.umu.se]

Both work well.

Jeff