Reliable Offsite Backup Services for Linux?

southern asks: "I have a client that would like to backup his data to an external server in addition to tape. His office is made up of a couple of Linux server and a few NT machines. What backup services are out there for Linux servers? Services like NetMass and others only work with Windows."

TSM/Legato?

[larien]

Both TSM (formerly ADSM; from IBM) and Legato Networker have linux and NT servers/clients. However, the license fees for them are somewhat steep, reaching into the 4 figure area quite quickly.

Re:What the heck are "Rervices"?

[Clifton Wood]

GAH!

Misspelling fixed. I just noticed it. This is what happens when you rush to post so you can take care of other work related tasks.

Host your own off-site?

[mini me]

How about sticking a server in a colo facility and using it as the backup server? The biggest problem I see with this is cost. The upside of this is that colo's usually have good security and disaster prevention methods in place and it is your own machine that you are backing up to, not someone elses. All you'd need is a basic computer with enough storage (and possibly redundancy, RAID-5 maybe? Depends on how reliable it has to be I guess) then you can just upload all your data to it when you wish.

Since you are uploading through the public internet you may want to encrypt your data. This can be done by uploading it through a VPN or you may just want to store the data as an encrypted file on the remote machine (just in case).

Like I said, I'd imagine this route wouldn't be cheap due to colo costs, but since I don't know exactly what it would cost you and how much you are willing to spend, it may be affordable. But it is your own machine that you control, you don't have to worry about your off-site backup company going broke and losing all your data.

NFS exports...IPsec/VPN

[stilwebm]

A lot of people I have worked with or talked to about this type of service use NFS over a private or virtual private network. With srtict controls over who can see your NFS exports, it can be quite secure. Any number of tools can be used to automate the backup process, depending on how you wish to have files archived. For incremental and full periodic backups you can use free tools.

A simpler question

[_typo]

I want to sync work & home machines. I like rsync but dislike the fact that it does it's work with unencrypted channels. How can I tunnel rsync so that my data stays secure. For authentication I use ssh but what about encryption? SSH tunneling? Anyone know?

Re:A simpler question

[phutureboy]

???

I use rsync-over-ssh to sync my dev and production servers. It works *great*. Just add the --rsh=ssh option to the rsync command.

Is the data transfer portion of that not encrypted?

Re:A simpler question

[_typo]

As far as I know, that way rsync uses ssh to authenticate and run rsync on the other machine and then opens the connection through it's own protocol, which is unencrypted.

Veritas NetBackup

[BobBoLo]

Veritas [veritas.com] NetBackup has a multi platform backup solution. They don't have a linux server solution yet, but they have linux clients.

Real backup solutions

[johnjones]

what cant handle a backup?
Xdrive, co-location servers anything stored on the internet

WHY ?

SIZE matters
most people documents are fine but when a company has 2TBthen things change a bit really a full backup takes most of the night and is a real pain it has to be done to a fast location and also to a cheap device (you want more than one backup dont you!) that means DLT or some other tape then you simply take tape along to fire safe and send a copy to storage offsite so what am I saying ? Tar & gzip are your friend (dont mention veritas ;-)

really this is asking where can i store a couple of my personal files which the answer is

WebDAV

linux has DAVfs and there are a couple of utils
this is nice because MacOS suports it as well as windows (those funky office 2k and XP file dialogs have it as a selection )

really its quite simple

regards

john jones