Enterprise backup software?

[Zolcos]

In my house there are 5 Windows computers (2 workstations, 2 laptops, 1 HTPC) and 2 Linux (1 internal file/application server, 1 public facing web/game server).
My old backup strategy was just to get out the esata enclosure once every couple months and save my personal files and the installers needed to rebuild the windows systems onto a pair of hard drives which go in a safe. I am quickly outgrowing that strategy though: it takes too much time, my backups are worryingly outdated, and there is no quick recovery. I work from home so it's important to reduce risk, and confidentiality agreements probably prevent me from putting some of that data in any kind of cloud storage.

What I am thinking of is having a server program that does incremental backup of all the computers over the network to a big raid5. One of my previous employers had a solution like that, I don't remember the name, but it even allowed for self-serve recovery of individual lost files on a client machine.
Also important is the ability to generate a full image for a machine: in case a PC gets stolen or destroyed, I can buy another one with the same hardware and restore it fully from backup instead of doing a scratch rebuild (installing OS etc)
And of course I will want to periodically dump the whole backup array to a series of tapes and throw that in the fire safe

Acronis seems like it has a version that does at least most of this, but I've tried using their home edition for smaller scale purposes before and their bootable tool won't recognize my generic usb keyboard on either PC so it's pretty useless.

 

[Paperlantern]

For my home setup I have a central server with a RAID 5 array made up of three 1TB drives giving me a sizable 2TB storage volume. All the house PCs have mapped drives to the server as well as access to any of the shares. All files of any importance are stored on the server. The server has Crash Plan installed (a free utility as long as you back up locally or just to another of your own or friends computers, paid if you use their cloud storage) and points to an external fire wire drive that backs up all essentials at regular intervals. Crash Plan takes care of everything, you just tell it what directories you want backed up and it monitors usage and will back up if there are changes, in my environment i get 2 or three backup reports a week via e mail, I would imagine in a heavier use environment you may get them more often. There is a cloud option for a fee in Crash Plan, but its optional and the software is fully functional if backing up to another computer or attached media.

With this you could even go the next step and install Crash Plan on every machine in the house and tell them to back up their files to your server, and still then back up the server to an external drive.

You would still have to do some sort of Tape Rotation with this setup to utilize your fire safe routine. Maybe you could do those bi weekly or monthly or something.

The setup works great for me, I get the redundancy of being able to lose 1 whole disk, as well as knowing if i lose the array, i can restore very easily by rebuilding a fresh array and telling crash plan to recover. Done.

 

[Red Squirrel]

At home I have a bunch of internal drives that I rotate and treat as tapes, they go into a HDD dock which is connected to my main server via esata. I run a command on the server which runs the appropriate backup job for that particular drive. There are duplicate drives in case of failure and some are moved offsite about once a month.

What's nice is by creating new scripts (basically a few lines calling another script that does the legwork) I can create as many different jobs as I want. Right now I have one for my data, one for VMs and one for torrent/p2p stuff. (movies etc). The one for my data is the one I run the most often, the others are less crucial. The VMs store their data on the main server via smb or nfs so that gets backed up by the main job.


Oh and the scripts use rsync to do the backups, which copies any files that have changed at the source. So once you ran the initial backup the rest are rather fast.

 

[weovpac]

If you want to do the backups using a Linux machine, there are plenty of options. I prefer rsnaphot[1] which uses rsync. Like Paperlantern mentioned Crash Plan is another option. Also take a look at Duplicati[2].

[1] http://www.rsnapshot.org/
[2] http://www.duplicati.com/

 

[Zolcos]

Thanks for the ideas. To clarify, I definitely wanted to use the Linux app server as the backup server. And while free solutions are of course preferred, I wouldn't mind spending a bit.

CrashPlan looks really nice but the lack of a 'bare metal restore' is a deal breaker.
I was able to find the system my old job used, it is called 'novabackup' and appears to have all the features I want but it only works with Windows and so is not very useful.

 

[Paperlantern]

Yeah Crash Plan is more for DATA backups on working machines, you could try CloneZilla for bare metal stuff, guy I work with swears by it.

 

[weovpac]

Clonezilla is indeed nice for cloning. But if you only have a Linux Live-CD around, dd or ddrescue[what I would use if available] will work just as well.

On the Live-CD topic, highly recommend grml[1].

[1] http://grml.org/

 

[skyking]

I have cloned drives of the computers. I don't install a ton of programs, so not having a really current image is not too important for me.
I use a linux fileserver (raid 1)with dirvish installed on it. I have a backup server offsite. In your case it could be friends or family. In my case it is one of my clients.
All files go on server. Dirvish backs up every night.

 

[Fallen Kell]

http://www.bacula.org/en/

 

[TwiceOver]

Crashplan or BackupPC

 

[Harvey]

.
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Acronis seems like it has a version that does at least most of this, but I've tried using their home edition for smaller scale purposes before and their bootable tool won't recognize my generic usb keyboard on either PC so it's pretty useless.

I know it's a side issue, but check your CMOS settings. Some motherboards require you to enable USB keyboard, mouse, etc. in the CMOS, rather than relying on Windows to recognize them, which may not be the default setting.