Linux Format forums

Re: Backup server

wyliecoyoteuk — Wed Jun 30, 2010 9:45 pm

Author: wyliecoyoteuk

Posted: Wed Jun 30, 2010 9:45 pm

Good necroposting, Backuppc is excellent, we use it for our "backup backup", with truecrypt for our offsite backup on USB drives.

Re: Backup server

nelz — Wed Jun 30, 2010 8:39 pm

Author: nelz

Posted: Wed Jun 30, 2010 8:39 pm

I hadn't noticed the age, it showed up as a topic wnew posts. I suspect someone may have spammed it and one of the other mods deleted the spam. So I replied to history as if it were current affairs

Re: Backup server

indie — Wed Jun 30, 2010 5:10 pm

Author: indie

Posted: Wed Jun 30, 2010 5:10 pm

Following on from what nordle was saying, there's a version of rsync for Windows called cwRsync which is based on the cygwin package but only includes rsync, ssh, ssh-keygen. It's available from here. There's a guide here explaining how to set it up on windows, it's for a hosted service they offer but the same still applies to using your own rsync server. On the Windows boxes you'd run rsync over ssh with public keys meaning you don't need to enter passwords to login.

"rsync.net" also offer their own Windows binary "rsync.net backup agent", again for their own service, but you could use it yourself if you wanted. Even though it's called 'rsync.net' I don't think it uses rsync, instead it just runs over sftp. It does however have a nice GUI if that's your thing and a built in scheduler. They also provide a guide here for setting up rsync on a MAC.

There's a Windows GUI for rsync called DeltaCopy which is available from here.

In order to get public key authentication working under Windows you'll need to copy your private key file id_rsa to "C:\Documents and Settings\%USERNAME%\.ssh\id_rsa"

I hadn't noticed how old the original post was until I'd written this. Bit of an old one to be resurrecting nelz!

Re: Backup server

nelz — Wed Jun 30, 2010 2:03 am

Author: nelz

Posted: Wed Jun 30, 2010 2:03 am

I use BackupPC and find it very good, and it fulfils your requirement of automatically resuming after broken connections. Once set up, you can just forget about it, it will mail you if there are any problems.

RE: Backup server

nordle — Sat Dec 23, 2006 4:02 pm

Author: nordle

Posted: Sat Dec 23, 2006 4:02 pm

I've got a similar setup, the backups occur every 2 hours automatically, and it only copies files which have been altered.

I good explanation can be found here:
http://www.gaztronics.net/rsync.php

Essentially, rsync is installed on all machines (using cygwin on windows boxes) and you store config files saying which directories are allowed to exported to incoming rsync requests.
These are authenticated using passwords, so should be reasonably secure.

You then have rsync server (linux) with cron jobs running every xyz and new files are automatically copied across the network.
You can get a little more complicated and use compression etc, but I don't bother.

I also setup samba to share these backups based on username, so the users can retrieve files themselves if needed, you just map the network drive in windows (or create mount point in linux, if thats what they are using).

I used to use this web based software, which does the same thing, but I found it overkill eventually.
Might be worth looking at though:
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

Infact, its the already packages cygwin rsync daemon from backuppc which im using on the winxp machines:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=34854

Backup server

thusgaard — Sat Dec 23, 2006 11:15 am

Author: thusgaard

Posted: Sat Dec 23, 2006 11:15 am

Hi

I plan to setup a backup server for my family (pictures and vidioes).

The plan is to make a machine with the system on RAID 0. And data on RAID5.

I want to run Linux as the system and the backup software on the server should run on this system.

The clients should have personal accounts, securing their personal backups from other users.

The client PC's are running Windows (2000 and XP) and MAC OSX

I "dream" of making a backup folder, where the users copy every thing they want backed up. The backup is then going via their ADSL connection, when avaliable.

The machines need to be able to shut down in the middle of a backup and continue when they are back online.

Does such software excist?

Merry christmas

J