[BBLISA] Backup Windows systems to samba?

[Edward Ned Harvey (bblisa4)]

> From: bblisa [mailto:bblisa-bounces at bblisa.org] On Behalf Of Dan Ritter

In the past, I've used Acronis TrueImage for this purpose.  Each laptop connects to the backup server with a different username/password, so there's none of this 777 problem you mentioned, meanwhile the engineers cannot access the backups of the CEO or the finance people, and vice-versa.

There are a couple of caveats I want to throw in:  The Acronis solution worked fine because we had a homogeneous environment.  Get it to work on one system, it works on all of them.  More recently, I've tried to repeat that success in a more diverse environment, and have found, for no apparent reason, Acronis fails to run on a bunch of the laptops, and also there are complexities about which DVD to boot from in order to perform a restore - For some systems, the default DVD works fine, for others, I have to download a specialized one from Acronis.  The only way to find out is to give it a try and/or contact support.  (Their support are idiots.)

Most of the time, once it's working, Acronis simply works.  But it's important to monitor the destination, because sometimes for no apparent reason, the checkbox you selected for "automatic cleanup old backups" doesn't work, and the backup destination grows indefinitely until there's no more room on the server.  Or worse - Sometimes for no apparent reason, Acronis fails to work, and then it will never work again, until you delete the backup profile and delete the backups and recreate it.  For an environment with 20 users, I would routinely monitor the backup server once a month, and I found each month I would have about 1 person whose backups needed attention.

I also had to hack on a pre-command script, to ensure the backups would not attempt to start while the user is working from home connected via VPN.  By default, if the server is reachable, the client tries to use it, clogging their upload pipe and rendering their work-from-home experience very significantly degraded.

Also, Acronis scheduling is like "once every N hours," or "once every N days at Foo:O'Clock."  We wanted to run once a day, and the only way to do that was to specify a specific time.  So then of course everyone chooses 12:00.  I had to make my pre-command script also pay attention to when was the last time we ran successfully, and only run once a day, and schedule the job hourly so the server wouldn't get hammered by everyone at the same time.

A few months ago, I started to research Time Machine alternatives for windows, and produced this list.  It is currently a to-do item to evaluate these - Nothing but a list of things I want to look into, and see if they might be better than Acronis.

* [http://www.shadowprotect.com/shadowprotect-backup-software-downloads ShadowProtect]
* [http://www.oo-software.com OO DiskImage Pro]
* [http://www.genie9.com Genie Timeline]
* [http://www.altaro.com/home-pc-backup/ Altaro Oops!Backup]
* [http://ax64.com/ AX64]
* [http://www.horizondatasys.com/en/rollback_rx.ihtml Horizon Datasys RollBack RX (has a negative comment on LOPSA)]