Affordable (<£200) ntbackup replacement

[danboid]

Scheduled backups with ntbackup have come to a halt on one of our 2003 servers- it complains about lack of free space on the target drive even though there is more than enough. It used to be an intermittent error but it fully refuses to work now and I'm sick of trying to coax it back into operation.

 

Acronis is way too expensive for us, as is Paragon Drive Backup server and Symantec Backup Exec. Macrium is sanely priced but turned out to be no use as it doesn't support dynamic partitions so I'd have to re-create the data drives as regular partitions to use Macrium and I really don't like the sound of that.

 

So what affordable (ie sub £200) options are there for someone wanting to do 'live' backups of a 2003 server? I see there are rsync ports for Windows but would rsync preserve ACLs and other cryptic and nasty NTFS metadata type stuff? Whatever we use it'd be nice if the image could be restored off a live CD/ USB drive.

[smadison]

Try Robocopy, PM me if you want more info on we do it.

[plexer]

R1Soft CDP???

[sted]

i like macrium reflect on 2008 its cheap and works

[laserblazer]

Do any of these encrypt?

[danboid]

So at the moment its CDP vs Robocopy. Does anyone here use CDP? Does it support dynamic partitions? Looks like they have a free version but I dunno what its limitations are.

[plexer]

I run r1 cdp not sure on the encryption I can check tomorrow.

[danboid]

plexer:

 

How long have you been running cdp? Have you found it reliable? Have you successfully restored a Server 2003 CDP backup and did it involve any dynamic partitions?

 

Have you had any problems with it and are there any features it lacks that may be present in other such tools?

 

Same to anyone else who is using CDP,

 

Thanks!

[danboid]

If I was to go with Robocopy then I would be syncing to a ubuntu (samba) server as thats what we have for a dedicated backup server atm and its working very nicely and I'm not too keen on having a windows one too unless absolutely necessary.

 

Anyone else here do robocopy backups to a samba share? Any tips for tweaking samba to get the best performance out of this? I'm running Ubuntu Server 9.04 on a XFS partition on the server, choice of OS was mainly down to FOG support.

 

I have been routing for tips on robocopy/samba usage and I came across this, which I'm going to try out today:

 

Using Robocopy to Samba (OpenFiler)

 

Anyone who had to reliably copy a bunch of data between machines SHOULD know robocopy.. I’ve used this tool for many years and it never failed me once..

 

However: this week i had to migrate a fileserver to new hardware(from Windows 2003 to OpenFiler 2.3) involving copying around 600 Gb of data .. knowing they were connected over a nice 1 Gb lan, i quickly wrote up a little script using robocopy to be able to mirror the original one to the new one, then at the point of the migration itself, i could just do an incremental update of the data changed between my original copy and the migration.. This all worked out fine except for the almost famous Timestamp bug on folders..

 

THis bug is easily solved in RoboCopy XP026 (XP027 is vista only and does not run on < Vista /Windows Server 2008 (where they FINALLY included robocopy in the OS -> thanks ms)

 

robocopy \\sourceserver\sourceshare \\destinationserver\destinationshare /TIMFIX /DCOPY:T /MIR /B /E /W:5 /R:5

 

But then, when i tryed to do the update, it all went evil.. for some odd reason, robocopy decided that ALL files where newer.. setting of to copy the whole 600 Gb AGAIN !

 

After a lot of searching, i finally found this link: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows/9754-nas-nas-mirror.html suggesting using the FAT Filesystem Timestamp.. Now.. using NTFS on the origin side and samba (with XFS underlying ) on the other.. but apparently: it works leading me to believe that samba addresses it’s disk with fat style timestamping !..

 

Eitherway: for all people having the robocopy re-copies (or mirrors ) all files as new(newer): /FFT is your flag you need to add !

 

The actual command i should have used is:

 

robocopy \\sourceserver\sourceshare \\destinationserver\destinationshare /TIMFIX /DCOPY:T /MIR /B /E /W:5 /R:5 /FTT

[mac_shinobi]

Bacula, the Open Source, Enterprise ready, Network Backup Tool for Linux, Unix, and Windows

 

Found the below but not sure how much use this is :

 

http://amanda.zmanda.com/

 

There was another one that elludes me for the time being that seemed pretty good but not sure if it was free or not.

 

list from wikipedia both free and commercial ( It was yosemite I was thinking of )

 

[ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backup_software[/ame]

Edited February 16, 2010 by mac_shinobi

[plexer]

plexer:

 

How long have you been running cdp? Have you found it reliable? Have you successfully restored a Server 2003 CDP backup and did it involve any dynamic partitions?

 

Have you had any problems with it and are there any features it lacks that may be present in other such tools?

 

Same to anyone else who is using CDP,

 

Thanks!

 

I've been running it for a few months, I don't have any dynamic volumes which are being backed up with it but as it's doing block level backup I expect it would be ok, drop R1Soft an email or something.

 

Yes it supports encryption.

 

I have done a pxe boot bare metal restore with it just to test it and that worked fine.

 

Ben

[danboid]

plexer:

 

Sounds good. If I can't get a FOSS or free backup solution working then I'll keep CDP in mind.

 

Mac_shinobi:

 

Yes, I should've thought to check out the wikip page on backup software.

 

At the moment there is only the one w2k3 server in need of a working automated backup solution so z/amanda and bacula sound like total overkill for what I'm trying to do.

 

Unfortunately I didn't find time to experiment with robocopy today, but right now I'm most interested in hearing peoples experiences with BackupPC. Its homepage makes no mention of support for any of the Windows server OSs so I'm wondering if I might be out of luck with that one?

 

BackupPC: Open Source Backup to disk

[jsnetman]

Backup Assist is a good one and really cheap and does exactly what its supposed to do, £139.

[danboid]

I've done some more reading round this and BackupPC would not be suitable for my use case as it is based upon rsync and rsync doesn't support transfer/ backup of Windows ACLs:

 

BackupPC FAQ: Limitations

 

However, it looks like it is possible to copy a w2k3 server to a samba server with ACLs preserved via the 'net rpc share MIGRATE' command:

 

Samba Administration Guide - File and Directory Migration

[danboid]

Rather than attempt to backup the w2k3 server with the aforementioned samba command, I now think I'd stand a much better chance of backing up the files to a samba share by using robocopy to do the file copying and using icacls to store NTFS permissions in a separate file which would also get copied over to the samba share.

 

I have read that icacls only stores DACL and not SACL permissions so could this cause a problem? We take down this server periodically to do a full image with clonezilla so I mainly want the daily online backup service to backup and restore the user data w/ all permissions intact but it would be a great bonus if I could use the same backup system (ie robocopy and icacls) to cover the system software, config and apps etc. too but I suspect this is where SACL support may be necessary?

[Modey]

Backup Assist is a good one and really cheap and does exactly what its supposed to do, £139.

 

Yeah Backup Assist is a nice program. It uses NTBackup (when on Server 2003) to do it's backing up, but you get a much more advanced interface for dealing with and setting up your backups. It's got some extra features like Exchange and SQL support that work very well also. When we bought a few licences last summer it was about £59 per basic license (educational discount), then for specific add ons like SQL it's a bit extra.

 

It might be worth a try to see if it gives your NTBackup the kick up the backside that it seems to need. They do a fully functional 30 day trial btw.

[adhutton]

Yeah Backup Assist is a nice program. It uses NTBackup (when on Server 2003) to do it's backing up, but you get a much more advanced interface for dealing with and setting up your backups. It's got some extra features like Exchange and SQL support that work very well also. When we bought a few licences last summer it was about £59 per basic license (educational discount), then for specific add ons like SQL it's a bit extra.

 

It might be worth a try to see if it gives your NTBackup the kick up the backside that it seems to need. They do a fully functional 30 day trial btw.

 

Sorry if this is going back a bit...we are looking at BackupAssist and it looks quite good. Got the free trial, but a bit confused about the licensing.

 

Does anyone know if we will need a license for every server we are backing up + SQL or just the server where the software sits?

 

Sorry if that sounds a bit dim, but I am really not sure!

 

Any help appreciated.

 

Andrew

[irsprint84]

dpm 2010 is £12 a pop if on microsoft agreement

[wesleyw]

@adhutton: You only license for the server the software runs from and for each type of thing it backs up for instance you can backup multiple file servers, if you have the SQL option you can backup multiple SQL servers etc..

 

 

 

Wes

[Iain]

We use the open source amanda network backup, Amanda Network Backup: Open Source Backup for Linux, Windows, UNIX and OS X for our backups of *nix, and windows servers, to a *nix file server, and tape at the same time. Took a little while to figure out the configuration, but now it's up and running, it's working really well. We went for this as it uses native backup formats tar and dump which means we can extract the backups on any machine.

[reggiep]

We use BackupAssist here and have found it very reliable. You can't knock £83 for a piece of backup software. Their support documentation is also very comprehensive and has helped me when we had to do a full restore of a 2008 server. Edited February 3, 2011 by reggiep
clarification

[plexer]

@adhutton: You only license for the server the software runs from and for each type of thing it backs up for instance you can backup multiple file servers, if you have the SQL option you can backup multiple SQL servers etc..

 

Wes

 

Yes and No actually have a look at BackupAssist Windows Backup Software for small to medium businesses - Frequently Asked Questions and it tells you what you can do with a single licence, if you want to backup the machine state you have to have a copy of backupassist on those actual machines, if all you want to backup is files then yes you can use one server to backup everything else.

 

Ben

[adhutton]

Yes and No actually have a look at BackupAssist Windows Backup Software for small to medium businesses - Frequently Asked Questions and it tells you what you can do with a single licence, if you want to backup the machine state you have to have a copy of backupassist on those actual machines, if all you want to backup is files then yes you can use one server to backup everything else.

 

Ben

 

Ok, let me check my understanding then. We were intending to install BackupAssist on one server and have it backup other servers, including system state, and copy the files to a NAS. We will also need to backup open files and an SQL server as well.

 

If we have 6 servers in total, I will need to purchase 6 copies (licenses) of the core BackupAssist application, 6 copies of the Open Files Add-on and 1 copy of the SQL server add-on?? Is that right?

 

Cheers - Andrew

[plexer]

You don't need the open files addon as it will use the vss open files engine to backup those but yes your other assumptions are correct.

 

Ben