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Network Backup Software?

Tahoe916

Tahoe916

Gawd
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Jan 11, 2007
Messages
640
At home I have a small, Micro-ITX Zotac server, with a 400w psu, Q6600, 4GB Ram and Windows 2008 R2 on it and 6TB of HD space. I use it to serve personal websites, email, VPN, and host all my DSLR pics/movies/music, etc.

I want to backup my laptops and desktop computer to it over the network, probably only locally but possibly over the intertubes. I've used Windows Backup but I hate that it creates a compressed backup file, I want more of something like scheduled RAID1 over the network.

Anyone know of some good software to accomplish this? TIA!:)
 
I do it but I use FreeBSD, not Windows Server 2008. On my server, I use rsync to load the most recent copies of my files onto the server and then take a snapshot with ZFS, and then create a nice symbolic link to the snapshot folder (.zfs/snapshot/%snapshot_name%). This happens every day, so I can easily see the state of my hard drive on any given day. It works beautifully, although it's more for backing up my files than for backing up my OS, since I'm pretty certain I can't restore Windows by simply copying files over.
 
I'm using Windows (Server 2008, 2008 R2, 2003, 2003 R2, XP, Windows 7, 32 and 64 bit). I use Robocopy locally (within the network) to back up data files from multiple systems to a central backup server. Works great. From the central server I back up to a 2008 R2 server I have at a colo facility using Rsync over SSH.

I've found Robocopy to be much faster on a LAN than Rsync, and of course Rsync is much faster across a slow WAN connection such as the Internet.
 
For a work department or company that has a mix of windows / linux / macintosh machines I recommend bacula.

www.bacula.org

This is free if you do not want paid support. In 6+ years of usage I have done over 20 thousand successful backups (40 to 60TB) over my work gigabit network to a variety of different storage. Being an open source project there are no silly license restrictions that prevent you from setting up your backups the way you want. I mean I have the backup database on 1 linux machine with the scheduling part on a different machine and storage on several machines. On the subject of support, the bacula mailing list is very good at user support. Significantly better than the paid support I had when I had purchased licenses of veritas for the department. A lot of this support is from users volunteering back time but there are a few developers that also frequent the support forum.

Although I use this on my home linux network its an overkill for most home users.
 
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I run BackupPC in a heterogeneous environment at home and even back up my Xbox with it.

http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

Whole system restores are easy, pop in a Linux liveCD, use sfdisk to partition, format partitions, install mount them, install ssh-server, copy the BackupPC user's SSH key over to /root/.ssh/authorized_keys and kick off the restore with the relative mount point.
Just a few minutes of work and you're on your way to being right back up and running.

Not a lot to configure, and it's flexible.
 
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