Dear Lazyweb….

Following from my previous post about my projects for the year, I could do with some help on identify the most suitable backup solution.

The setup is that there are a number of Windows clients, and a Linux server (probably with software RAID running a mirror setup over 2 drives, allowing for drive failure). The Windows machines may or may not be on the network at specific times (because they’re either laptops, or they’re powered down), and as there is no on-site sysadmin there is also no guarantee that there will be 100% (or 99.999% for that matter) uptime for the file server either. I want to backup important files from the Windows clients to the Linux machine in the most seamless, transparent (for the end user) way.

Originally I had set my heart on iFolder, which would allow me to simply set up “My Documents” on each client as an iFolder, and they would synchonise whenever both client and server are on the network. However, although iFolder is a fantastic piece of software, the project seems a bit dead in the water, and thus I’m not sure I want it in a production environment (plus there aren’t any Ubuntu or Debian packages for it, so I’d need to run CentOS, which I’m less familiar with).

So, I’m stuck for a decent solution. Ideally, as I say, I want it as transparent as possible - I could setup network drives with Samba (in fact, I had it this way in a previous incarnation), but that is not particularly transparent, and would require me (ideally) to setup all the users on the fileserver so that Windows will log in to the drive automagically. Plus, I’d still need some sort of client running to do the backing up, and I would still end up with the problem of it needing to be done on an “adhoc” basis, rather than a schedule.

Any thoughts?

mrBen

Transparent as possible, assuming XP or 2000 -
As much as it sucks, using My Docs redirection (right click My Docs and set the target) for the Windows boxes, and sending the data directly to an SMB share is probably about as transparent as you can get, and will work as long as you don’t allow users to write anywhere else on the disk. The only problem you get is Windows / someone allowing the redirected files to be made available offline. You could stop this with a local policy on each machine, however (since, afaik Samba doesn’t support GPO or Windows domains yet). If you wanted to really get inclusive, you could hack up a quick registry file to setup the entire user profile, and desktop, etc. to get redirected to the an SMB share. The only problem is that you can’t configure it via the Local Computer Policy on non-domain’ed PCs, hence the registry “hacking” (stored in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders on XP).

If you do this it would mean that the files are already on the file server and you just need to take care of that with a cronjob, or something else.

The other alternative would be something like http://freshmeat.net/projects/simplebackupmigas/ on each machine, and get them to sync to the file server that way, over whatever method you choose. Of course this requires the machines to be on

HTH

What we do at my job is setup a networked drive that has a folder for each user. We then map each user to their drive using the same drive letter. Finally we set the path of My Documents to be the networked drive in stead of c:/document and settings/user/My Documents/ Since their My Documents is now on the network it is trivial to seamlessly backup their data. The only caveat is that this relies on the network being reasonable stable, which ours is.

Thanks for the comments guys.

The network is relatively stable, but we have had problems in the past (bizarrely) with power outages. (Should probably get a UPS) Previously the file server had problems coming back from these outages, although of recent months (if not years) it’s been less of a problem. It does, however, make me slightly wary of having My Documents on an SMB share. Additionally, this would make things difficult for the 2/3 laptop users that we have.

Simple Backup looks like it might be a good solution, though - thanks for that.

For laptop users you could allow them to use offline files, which would make the redirected my docs available :shrug: possibly worth thinking about

Bacula is a decent opensource solution that can also backup windows (IIRC). Transparency is probably the most difficult thing. I was looking into unison http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ the other day and it looked good.

If you are good with the shell and can set up shares for the winboxen, then create a script that smbmounts to a temp dir, back it up with tar, umount it and move on to the next client. You can even do incrementals by creating a filelist first with find and use mtime based on the last time that client was successfully backed up.