Backing up several Windows machines to a Linux server

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 21 January 2005 17:49, Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote:
>Hi:
>
>I am faced with what *must* be a very common task: to make backups
> of user files on several Windows machines to the hard disk of a
> Linux server. So far I've only been responsible for backing up the
> servers, and rsync/rsnapshot plus mondo do a beautiful job of that.
>
>However, I am finding it a little difficult to find software that
> does this well. I do prefer to support open-source if at all
> possible, and I do prefer zero-cost as this is a small office; but
> I am able and willing to pay for software as long as the cost is
> reasonable.
>
>Here's what I've done so far:
>
> 1. Amanda (http://www.amanda.org) only seems to do backups to tape,
>yuck! I definitely want to back up to a hard drive: much faster and
> much cheaper, and I can then replicate the data store and take it
> home on my notebook. :-) At most we will have 10GB or 20GB of
> backups, not terabytes or anything huge.

Amanda works just fine with virtual tapes as files on a hard drive, 
I'm using it and have been for quite some time with a 200GB drive as 
my 'tape' device with 18 virtual tapes of about 10GB on it.

Goto the amanda.org website, scroll down the page quite a ways, and 
you will find a link to the latest 'snapshots', to use the virtual 
tape on a hard drive options, you will need the latest in the 
2.4.5b1-series, currently (as of yesterday anyway) at 
2.4.5b1-20041221.tar.gz.

Follow the building instructions, its a bit more than ./configure, 
make, make install.

If you run into problems, hit the 'amanda-users' mailing list that you 
can also sign up for on that same web page.  There is nearly always 
someone who has 'walked on your ground first" there.

> 2. Given that the clients are Windows and I need to automate
> backups (else they'll never get done), I don't see how I can use
> rsync and/or similar tools since they don't run on that OS. It
> seems to me that I need some sort of a client app on Windows that
> will push the backups to the server. Happy to be corrected if
> wrong, of course.

Amanda can backup a samba share, but the support for excludes and 
incrementals is not there as samba doesn't support the data that 
would allow those to work.
>
> 3. Bacula (http://www.bacula.org) *looks* pretty complete, but it
> also looks pretty confusing and complex to set up. It also speaks
> of difficulties backing up Windows clients. Not very attractive at
> first sight... does anyone know if it gets easier/nicer later?
>
Windows is never easy it seems.

> 4. Arkeia (http://www.arkeia.com) seems to do the trick. Clients
> for a lot of operating systems, server runs on Linux, even has
> plug-ins for backing up LDAP, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and others.
> Waiting for a price quote from them now, hopefully it will be
> affordable.

Its not. Plugins are their bread and meat, arkeia itself is almost 
free, but without the plugins, very limited.  My last quote for the 
tape library(so you can run tape changers), and licenses for 3 
machines was well over 2 grand.  5 years ago.
>
>Can I get some help/recommendations here? Any five-star products
> I've missed? Especially any really good, pretty cheap ones?

Amanda is good, very good, if you let amanda do it her way.  And real 
help is on the amanda-users mailing list, often only 20 minutes away.

But be aware that amanda looks at the whole picture, not just tonights 
run, and adjusts things to make the best useage of the facilities its 
given.  To do that, amanda must be given a stable run schedule, and 
over 3 or 4 cycles of this run schedule, things will balance out as 
amanda moves an individual backup up, sometimes several days, to 
adjust the schedule so amanda uses about the same amount of tape per 
run.  Its very good at that, and I've had weeks at a time where it 
filled a real tape to 95+% of its capacity without ever running into 
the dreaded EOT signal.

>Cheers,
>
>--
>Rodolfo J. Paiz <rpaiz at simpaticus.com>

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.