Backing up Window clients

[John Van Ostrand]

On Sun, 2007-07-15 at 11:43 -0400, John Sellens wrote:
> backuppc.sourceforge.net
> 
> de-duplication, snapshots, web interface for user restores, etc.

I think John has one good option for you. I haven't used backuppc but
I've looked at it for solving the issue you have. The issue with laptops
is the duplication. You can easily get 40GB on a laptop and that is the
capacity of your tape drive.

You also have other options. 

1. Use synchronized folders to backup their data to your server. This
occurs when they login and when the logout. It requires some careful
considerations to keep the process fast enough. For example you don't
want your Internet cache to be synchronized. One easy solution is to
sync the My Documents folder only. We have lots of customers using this
with Windows servers and some using it with Samba servers.

2. Another option that is useful for laptops that roam a lot is an
on-line backup. I haven't used any and I don't recall the names, but
there are services that specialize in this sort of thing. They backup
whenever there is an Internet connection. These companies provide the
software and the storage occurs on their servers.

3. rdiff-backup is a great disk-to-disk backup for low bandwidth (e.g.
high speed Internet) backup. Although I don't think it's suitable if you
have a lot notebooks, but if you have only one or two it may be worth a
try. It requires Cygwin, ssh, and rsync on Windows systems. You could
run a background task in Windows at login to do this silently. I'm not
sure what the results would be if it were interrupted.


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