[Lancaster] file server with backups - advice wanted

[Joost Noppen]

Hi Andy,

Can't answer all of your questions, but at least some pointers on the backup clients. There are a number of options you might want to look at:

- back in time
- time vault
- simple backup

All these work client side, but you can automate their execution using cron. I myself use back in time which is akin to Apple's time machine, with a very usable graphical front-end. This is tied to a shell script that triggers a backup once a day to an external hard drive. In the end, these tools really all build on rsync to do their magic. You even get incremental backup with it.

I imagine you can run this as long as the backup server has access to the drives where the files are stored (read access should suffice). Otherwise you might want to look at peter's backup, a gzip based program for Windows. The people would have to trigger the backup themselves though.

Bit of text this,if you have questions just let me know.

Cheers,
Joost

----- Reply message -----
From: "andy baxter" <andy at earthsong.free-online.co.uk>
Date: Mon, Feb 1, 2010 18:15
Subject: [Lancaster] file server with backups - advice wanted
To: "Lancaster Linux User Group" <lancaster at mailman.lug.org.uk>

Hi all,

The boss at the place I'm working has asked me to look into setting up a 
linux based file server for them, with a proper backup schedule. There 
are a bit over half a dozen employees at the moment, but this may 
increase in the future.

I haven't done anything like this before, so if anyone can answer any of 
the following questions, it would be a big help:
 - Most of the machines use windows, so I'll be using samba. How well 
does this work in practice with a network of windows machines?
 - Any advice on what hardware specs would be good for a proper server 
machine? In particular, is it necessary to use (hardware or software) RAID?
 - Does anyone know any (ideally local) companies that provide off site 
backup services which will work with linux? We don't need anything that 
complex - a linux file server with ssh / sftp would be enough I think.
 - What's a good backup tool to use? It should be able to deal with the 
off site backup service we are using.

The data to be backed up will be a mixture of office documents (on the 
samba server), and code (in a subversion repository).

thanks,

andy

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