Back-up for Networked PCs

[Maris]

I've recently been appointed as 'President' of my work's IT department with my 'Jack of all Trades' knowledge of computers & wondered if somebody could recommend a reliable & fool-proof back up system for our data. We've 3 premises with PCs networked together & I'm looking for a system which will automatically do the job once it's set up without too much intervention.
Thanks for your help.

[Rik]

How much data are you going to be backing up? Do you want to be able to take the backup off site?

[Maris]

Hi Rik

It's mainly Word & Excel documents, probably no more than 3000 documents. 'On-line' storage is what I was thinking, rather than just an external hard drive & ideally something that can just run in the background, back everything up daily & just be left until it's (hopefully never) needed.

Thanks

Maris     

[esh]

My configuration is thus;

-Workstation PCs with single internal hard drives and a Windows license, connected to a 100Mbit switch
-Router/gateway to allow external access and 1Gbit port to server
-Server running Debian Linux
-All Windows workstations mount a network drive on the server at boot time
-This network drive (Samba shares) are on RAID-1 SATA drives to ensure reliability
-I set up a cron (scheduled task) to 'rdiff-backup' the work folders once a day (this is free and written in Python, so may work on Windows, might need cygwin)
-This ensures I not only have an up to date second-copy, but I can also pick out a date of files since it is incremental ("I want this word document from 2 weeks 3 days ago")
-rdiff-backup works over ssh connections, so a remote site can also run an rdiff from data on the server, since the backup is compressed and incremental, it is only a small transfer if done often (and it is 128-bit encrypted)
-Systems with a broadband link can connect to the local Windows workgroup (and hence access the server) via Hamachi VPN. For laptops in the field, we use GPRS connections to allow transfer of files to and from the server using WinSCP (also free).

Advantages...
It's all automated. I don't have to think. It just does it.
If /storage/files is wiped, all I have to do is 'cp -r /storage/backup/files /storage/files'.
The server is on a RAID so if one drive dies, not only do you have all the data, but the server continues running
The backup is incremental. So if someone screws up their favourite file and doesn't realise for two weeks, we can still get it back.
The backup is incremental, so offsite transfers are small and don't hog the WAN.
The hardware is cheap. This is like a £400 server.
The software is cheap. In fact, on the server, it's almost entirely free/GPL.

Disadvantages...
When setup it's easy as cake, I don't even have to remember to click a button, but setting up took me a little amount of time (a week including testing).
You should really put a server on a UPS in this configuration (+£100).

[Maris]

Thanks Esh, I'm grateful for your detailed help.   

[Rik]

The other option would be an external HD, either USB or eSata, which you could take off site.

[Maris]

Thanks Rik. 

[esh]

If you have an external disk plugged in say ("D:\files") to backup your main work data ("C:\files") then if you install cygwin with rsync, it is only a matter of:

rsync -ravp /cygdrive/c/files /cygdrive/d/files

And having that run once a day/week/whatever. This isn't incremental but is fairly foolproof and the software is free at least. rdiff-backup is the slightly more advanced option I talked of. You should probably note that rsync/rdiff doesn't work nicely on windows if you have file names with asian characters in.

[bobleslie]

Maris, you should have a look at Windows Home Server which I use for my computer network and is very easy to use and saved my bacon on more than one occasion. It comes with a 10 seat license and is probably extendable as it's based on Windows Server 2003.

[Maris]

I appreciate all your advice, thanks. Not sure I quite understand it all of course but at least I'll seem clever at work next week.       

[esh]

Give a shout if you need advice or a guide on implementing this. I had to figure it all out a couple years ago too.

[Maris]

Thanks Esh.