Backup software
 

Hi,

I need a recommendation for easy to use software that. Basically, I would like this software to sit on a server machine on our home network and do the hard drive backup of the clients on the network.

We had a wired gigabit network at home so speed is not an issue.

Thanks!

Are you looking for a cheap solution or a reliable solution. Windows has a built in backup software that you can use as a cheap solution, other wise Veritas Backup Exec is what many companies use - http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/p....jsp?pcid=1018

Consider looking into SyncBack. It is very easy to use. You specify the directories that you want backed up and it copies over the files to whatever destination you specify. I use another separate hard drive. I don't think the free version compresses the backed up files though.

This isn't a one size fits all solution. I'm very curious to see what others use for their backup solutions.

I wouldn't recommend using the built in windows backup software or anything from Symantec. I prefer using low-profile programs that are reliable and do exactly what they are designed to do. Symantec's stuff uses a ton of system resources, has tons of bugs, has horrible support, and is expensive so IMHO it isn't worth using.

The software does not have to be very cheap but of course nothing that is enterprise wide (thousands of dollars). Windows GUI of course, and the ability to manage backup from client workstations on a server (versus having the software on the client machine).

Thx

What are you backing up to, DVD, another disk, tape?

Virtually any backup software can back up the clients, the easiest way is to share their drives and map them from the server, so that server is just backing up a bunch of drives it sees as local drives. That's way easier then messing with clients on the workstations, etc.

It won't get the registries, but as long as you have an export of the registry on each hard drive (something everybody should have anyways) it will have a backup of it that way.

I've been very happy with Acronis True Image. Easier to use than Ghost, imo.

Somewhere in this forum from awhile back there is a link to a free version.

I would be backing up to another hard disk (RAID setup) where it would dump the files. The scheduled would do incremental backups overnight. In essence, this server will serve as a file/backup server for all intensive purposes, with very little interaction on the side of the workstations.

I asked our IT guys about this just a week or so ago. They recommended either Paragon Drive backup or Acronis for PCs and Carbon Copy for Macs. I downloaded a trial version on Paragon yesterday and tried it. Interface took a bit of thought to figure out but once done, it seems easy to use. I need to ask one of our IT guys to make sure Im making a bootable drive on the USB drive with the way I am doing it. It looks like a solution worth considering.

One more piece of software to consider is Dantz Retrospect. That is bundled with those Maxtor Onetouch external backups but in the Lite version. The fully-featured version is nice.

I have used veritas, ghost and acronis and I would take acronis every day of the week. its a great product. not sure how expensive the enterprise version is but that would be my first choice.

Microsoft is working on a product called Windows Home Server. I've been playing around with the beta version, and while it's not quite ready for primetime it looks like it's going to be very cool. Single Instance Store backups of all client PC's, and you can restore single files or a full bare-metal restore. It also becomes a central storage point with file replication across multiple disks (not RAID), so you can just plug in an extra USB drive and duplicate files. It also sets up remote access to PC's and files, and a whole bunch of other stuff.


http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070108-8573.html

Until then, I like the idea of just using something like SyncBack (or Microsoft SyncToy).