[ale] Need advice on home back-up solution

[Bob Toxen]

#1 requirement is that the backup solution has OFF-site backups.  A
fireproof safe will not protect you when a thief carries it off to be
cracked at his leasure, thinking you have money in it

A removable disk is a solution if you have two and one of them (at a
time) will fit in your off-site storage location.  My DDS-2 tape drive
was only a few hundred dollars 3 years ago and still runs great.

Samba would be a good way to move the data from the Windows boxen to
Linux.  Then backup the Linux box.  GNU tar will do multi-tape backups.

I find Amanda to be overkill (and too much trouble) for most uses.
I did create my own multi-tape multi-box remote backup software for
several clients that is easy-to-use and works very well.

Bob Toxen
bob at verysecurelinux.com               [Please use for email to me]
http://www.verysecurelinux.com        [Network&Linux/Unix security consulting]
http://www.realworldlinuxsecurity.com [My book:"Real World Linux Security 2/e"]
Quality Linux & UNIX security and SysAdmin & software consulting since 1990.

"Microsoft: Unsafe at any clock speed!"
   -- Bob Toxen 10/03/2002

On Fri, Sep 26, 2003 at 03:43:59PM -0400, Bill Hamilton wrote:
...
> I need a solution (probably made up of OpenSource/Free Software and 
> cmd/batch/windows scripting scripts) where each of my various Microsoft 
> based operating systems routinely backup user created information to an 
> ftp or smb server (GNU/Linux box listed above).  I do not have a tape 
> drive on each machine nor a CD Burner (however the newest upstairs Sony 
> Viao does have a DVD-R/RW burner so I could weekly pull these archives 
> off of the Linux server and burn to DVD as long as these archives are 
> less than 4.7GB each).  I do have a spare 17GB hard drive and I was 
> thinking of putting this also in the GNU/Linux box as a mirrored 
> partition just in case...probably a good idea before I go too far down 
> the road doing work on this fresh install of RH9.

> What does the ALE crowd recommend?

> At work we use Connected TLM network backup software and that seems to 
> work very well.  I can open it's app and restore with ease but this kind 
> of use would be icing on the cake.

> Other icing or advanced needs would be:

> 1.  Not have to go to each machine and manually start a backup
> 2.  Because we don't store everything in a c:\data folder then what I 
> choose should not only pick-up "My Documents", "My Pictures" "RoboForm 
> Data" but also by filename or filename extension on the hard drive. 
> 3.  Actually be a (web based) document management system. 
> 4.  Notify me of duplicate files.

> I'm pretty adept with winzip command line and windows batch file writing 
> so I could hack out a generic series of scripts that should work on each 
> machine to create and transmit zips up to the server but I would like 
> for these files to be unzipped up on the GNU/Linux box.

> Any suggestion welcome...

> -Bill Hamilton