Backup Solution for Field Netbooks?

L

Landmine

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 19, 2011
Messages
402
We have about 20 computers that are in the field and about once a day at different times they get online to process work. During that time, I'd like them to execute a backup to an online service or back to our server. The amount of data per PC is around 400mb total, with maybe 1mb changing a day. Standard online solutions seem overly expensive for this netbooks.

The computers are not online all of the time so hosting the data only in the cloud will not work, we also looked into terminal services, wont work for us.

I've looked into moving the desktop and documents folders into a dropbox account and setting them up to selective sync. Users will only see their own folder. This works great, with the small exception that new folders added in dropbox automatically are downloaded as it assumes new folders should be sync'd to all clients.

Example Structure:

[Dropbox Account]
--User1
---- My Docs
---- Desktop
---- Favorites
--User2
---- My Docs
---- Desktop
---- Favorites
--Shared Folder
---- Subfolder

At this point I'm about ready to cave in and say there is no way to do it without paying for an online service per computer. At that point they will say it is not in the budget and nothing will be done.

Anyone else have a creative idea on how to solve this problem? I would also like to make my life easier by not have a free account per computer, so that it can be managed from a central location.
 
Last edited:
Crashplan offers the ability to use their software, but instead of using their servers it instead uses another personal computer. This is free to use.

http://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/Latest/Backup/Backing_Up_To_Another_Computer_You_Own

You might check that out to see if it's something you could make it work in your sysadmin environment. I believe the software does the "delta" or "versions" type backups where it only uploads that which has changed. So you're not uploading an entire image of everything every time. I know once I got the intial information uploaded, my weekly crashplan emails were of pretty small data sizes.

One thing I was thinking is that Crashplan is unlimited storage per computer. So if you had a bunch of computers backup to your computer, then put that data in a container, what would stop you from then using crashplan to backup all that data under one account? It would only be like $80 or $100 a year. I have heard people talk about backing up their movie collections and it being several terabytes, like 8-10TB. And crashplan doesn't say a word.
 
Also check out OwnCloud. The same as dropbox, but you can install server app on your server, so everything is hosted in your company
 
I agree with crashplan pro or crashplan pro e. If you don't need features like file versioning and deleted file recovery take a look into bittorrent sync. It works extremely well and is very simple to setup.
 
Crashplan is quite expensive if you want your own server and it saves files in its own format. Owncloud saves files directly, so you have a look at all the files. It also supports file versioning and you get web access as well.
Also, i think owncloud client is more lightweight what crashplan's java client.
 
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