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

[skroz]

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?

[graphicartist82]

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...

[__aaclcg7560]

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

Bacula

[jamesh]

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.

Options to check out...

[CFrankBernard]

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

[nizo]

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

[Futurepower(R)]

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.

BackupAssist

[speeDDemon (nw)]

I am not affiliated with BackupAssist (www.backupassist.com [backupassist.com]) in any capacity other than a customer and have been thrilled with the product.

Simple and easy to use interface, multitude of options, logging, reporting. One of the features that I find most compelling is that the program is essentially a gui wrapper for the Windows Backup program and thus works perfectly with all the server and professional versions of windows seamlessly.

All too often we must make do with microsoft offerings, Backup Assist makes microsoft backup what it SHOULD have been

Praise for AMANDA

[Noksagt]

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 reasons make AMANDA a better fit.

We have a 5 TB RAID-5 FreeBSD server and a handfull of clients (mostly windows, but a few OS X and Linux boxes). The cygwin clients work well & there are now binaries, so you don't have to compile it yourself (as we did when we set it up a few years ago).

"Problematic" clients (such as laptops which aren't on at night) use rsync+ssh to backup to the server (which is then additionally put on tape).

Amanda provides options to encrypt the network traffic and/or the backups. It has reasonably good indexing & supports tape changers. It even supports RAIT. I have a few gripes, but relatively few of them in comparison to other backup software.