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?"

External HDD

[Daemonstar]

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

[RancidPickle]

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

[pahoran]

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

Handy Backup

[Anonymous Coward]

I suggest Handy Backup: http://www.handybackup.com/ [handybackup.com]. Simple, works well, and inexpensive.

ClarkConnect Linux and Bacula

[enigmatichmachine]

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.

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

[GrpA]

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.

Backup Links

[thisNameNotTaken]

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

Re:Bacula

[lactose99]

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 backups (via mysqldump) and has a highly-configurable scheduler.

I work for a small/medium business (~150 employees) with a variety of Linux, BSD, and Win32 hosts, and we use bacula for all our backup work. Actually, we are also using BackupExec for a few of the Win32 boxes but will likely be switching strictly to Bacula once we get 2.0.0 implemented in production (of which I am the lead implementor).

Currently, we backup about 70 hosts daily with bacula v1.36, using Bacula's on-disk file storage on a 1.7TB RAID5 volume for daily backups and AIT-2 tapes for weekly differential and monthly full backups (2 copies of each full backup, one to store locally and one to ship off-site as part of our disaster-recovery requirements). Bacula is fantastic for this, particularly for locating and restoring files that were backed-up at a specific point in time (to appease the occational "can you restore a proposal I created two weeks ago and have since overwritten several times?" users). With this upgrade I'm performing, we're moving from the older AIT-2 tapes to Ultrium3 which has a 400GB/800GB (compressed) capacity per tape, about 10 times that of our AIT-2's. Couple that with a Dell ML6000 tape library and 36 tape slots and we now have a backup system that will easily grow with our organization. And all for FREE! Bacula's mailing lists are fantastic for support and answering those not-so-easy questions.

My only real gripe with the system is the inability for backups stored on multiple volume types (disk-based versus tapes) to be restored via a single job, but I believe this has been addressed with 2.0.0. Other than that, I love Bacula! I've been more excited about the 2.0.0 release than any other software upgrade in quite a while.

More notes about backup software.

[Futurepower(R)]

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]