backup software

Anyone know of some backup software that will allow me to backup data/files from multiple windows computers to a remote linux or windows server but also so that others cannot access others files? So CP1 can not access CP2s backed up files.

This is not a local server on the network. This is a remote one. The computers can not work/operate on a Domain Controller either. They each are separate so no Active Directory.

If your server is Linux, setting up a rsync server is trivial and you can set username/password for each account.

Actually if it is so trivial, I'd really appreciate a step by step. I've been trying to set up rsync on Mac and PCs to a Linux server off and on for a year, and there's always something that doesn't work.

In the end I ended up buying Windows Home Server (WHS), the first version, a few years ago and as a general server I found it pretty much sucks (built a Linux server for data 6T using RAID 1), but as a back up machine it's already saved my *** over the last 2 years at least 7 times, 5 of which were complete drive failures (I have 3 PCs being backed up by it) from which I recovered within a few hours for the largest 1T drives (about 30 minutes for a 120gig SSD). The other 2 were a complete format and re-copy because of suspected either invasion and infection or Windows Update SNAFU (OSes starting acting totally screwy).

The new version of WHS sells for $50 (used to be $100) so for the PC it's a good solution. It backs up every drive on every system incrementally every night (you decide the time) and also doesn't multi-copy files that are common to every system, so in the end the total size of the backups are smaller that the sum total of all the systems.

I also have a MPB: for that I rely on Time Machine and SuperDuper for a bootable image and keep those updated as often as I can.

These are my two working solutions for PC and Mac.

I was recommend www.crashplan.com but might be too costly then what i can actually use. the biggest issue is some of the systems have financial data on them so when they backup they need to be isolated from all the other systems that get backed up. so ideally it would be nice that only the admin of server/host could actually access ALL the backups.

Tiff, I didn't see the part where you said it was remote. Rsync is still a possibility over SSH, but I think CrashPlan would be a much better option since it has a user-friendly interface to the end user.

Breeze, I believe your issue needs its own thread. Create one, send me the link, and I'll do my best to help you out.

I've looked at and strongly considered Crashplan myself as a alternative to WHS, as I too use WHS just for backups. Crashplan seemed very good except for two things; no data de-duping like WHS does, and no bare-metal restoration.

The first would mean that you need more space for each and every PC you backup as no data/files would be shared between the backups, which for me makes no sense as all my PCs that are being backed up all run Windows 7. That's around 20GiB alone per PC just for the \Windows directory in it's entirety (not taking into account any compression the backup software does).

The second was a real deal breaker. I love the fact that with WHS, I can restore individual files as far back as my backups are kept, and if the drive(s) goes belly up, I can even restore from scratch a full drive, even if it was the OS drive. Crashplan is strictly for individual file backups and cannot restore bare-metal at all, so if the main OS drive in your system dies, you'll need to restore the OS and all installed programs pretty much from scratch, which makes the backup all but useless when you need to get up and running back to normal asap.

One suggestion (though probably a complicated one), is using WHSv2, which can make use of iSCSI, and encrypt the folder(s) that the backups will be going to. Don't ask me for specifics on this though, as its just a quick thought that crossed my mind just now.

thideras said:

Breeze, I believe your issue needs its own thread. Create one, send me the link, and I'll do my best to help you out.

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Thanks for the offer thideras! I'll have to get back into my Linux mindset to tackle it though... hopefully I can do that soon while you're still interested in helping me out!

Mpegger said:

I love the fact that with WHS, I can restore individual files as far back as my backups are kept, and if the drive(s) goes belly up, I can even restore from scratch a full drive, even if it was the OS drive.

Click to expand...

Actually that reminds me: in some ways WHSv1 (don't know if v2 is different) doesn't verify the validity of it's backups so it's a good idea to occasionally use the mount feature to check if you can mount and read the backups. It's better than a sad surprise at recovery time... There is a free plugin someone wrote (WHSDBBU? or something like that) that will let you back up your WHS database externally, but that requires more management and external HD space; it could be built right into WHS and replicated internally.

After a major problem with WHS and some 2T hard drives (chkdsk ran for 7 days straight which probably damaged the drive even more... what an anachronism that program is!) which led me to a complete reinstall of WHS, I learned to use multiple smaller drives in it because they're easier to manage and I got rid of all of the plugins I was using except for Diskkeeper which auto defrags the system and saves some drive wear and tear. The plugins just seemed to make a mess of things and cause unnecessary anxieties.

Mpegger said:

One suggestion (though probably a complicated one), is using WHSv2, which can make use of iSCSI, and encrypt the folder(s) that the backups will be going to. Don't ask me for specifics on this though, as its just a quick thought that crossed my mind just now.

Click to expand...

I briefly looked at WHSv2, but as long as v1 works and they don't come up with better utilities than Chkdsk, I'm not in a hurry to change. In fact I read somewhere that Windows 8 finally introduces a better disk checking model that can verify disk integrity and keep a disk online; I hope that's true because that's what's needed with today's multi-terabyte hard drives.

So WHSv2 works as a great way to securely backup user data from several computers to where no one else can access each others? Even if you do it for over 10 different businesses?

tiff2342 said:

So WHSv2 works as a great way to securely backup user data from several computers to where no one else can access each others? Even if you do it for over 10 different businesses?

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AFAIK, any WHS is limited to a single local network and limited to a certain number of clients (I think 5 to 10 computers). It's a consumer product. For what you want to do you'd need more expensive business solutions.

But that's why I was interested in running rsync: in theory you can do continuous or scheduled, compressed transfer, incremental backups on a continuous basis to other onsite or offsite computers. I really need to start a discussion of this here, but I'm not sure which category I should be putting it in... maybe this one?

But it's a bit of a chew to set up, but in principle can be used across all platforms and I would really like to get it working. It's also a great way of maintaining a work archive between co-workers on a project. It's not as efficient in space (it'll copy everything) but the benefits are real. Oh, and it's completely free.

Guess another option is resell 3rd party backup solutions

Hi, tiff2342!

What’s about @Max SyncUp? I would recommend trying it insistently. configuring the sftp-server you can do backup to the other PCs.