Backing up several Windows machines to a Linux server

[Robert L Cochran]

This seems a challenge to me, as well. I wonder if the users are all on 
NTFS filesystems? If so, a further question: would copying a user's 
files from an NTFS partition to a FAT32 partition then strip away all 
the metainformation for those files such as permissions? If so, a 
further question: are the file permissions that would be lost require 
restoring?

What I'm thinking of is you should create one big FAT32 (or NTFS) drive 
on an external drive for example. Then use batch scripts or some product 
like Tivoli to copy each user's files to  the backup drive. Unplug the 
drive, remove the hard drive from the case, replace it with another hard 
drive and bring the backup drive to some safe offsite repository. 
Continue doing this till you have a few generations of backup drives and 
can keep a rota. Also, decide how far back you want to go.

Or, grab the free drive copying software that companies like Western 
Digital give out freely and use it to copy an image of each user's hard 
drive to a backup drive.

The University of Maryland also has a method for many users to upload 
data to widely separated servers which are then synchronized to a single 
master server once or twice daily. I think this concept can function 
well for backup purposes. No, I'm not thinking of the Amanda product; 
this is something different...I can't recall the name of it at the 
moment, but it might serve your needs. I don't know if the technology is 
proprietary or open sourced.

Bob Cochran
Greenbelt, Maryland, USA


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.
>
>	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.
>
>	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?
>
>	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.
>
>Can I get some help/recommendations here? Any five-star products I've
>missed? Especially any really good, pretty cheap ones?
>
>Cheers,
>
>  
>