looking for a good backup program for a small Windows network

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SilverNodashi

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I'm curios, what backup software do you use for a small Windows network?



I need to backup 4 Windows XP PC's onto a central Windows PC, which has a removable backup drive that our accountant takes home every day. The other 4 PC's are used by accounts & sales staff, who don't necessarely know Windows or networking that well.



So I'm looking for something which I can install, configure and forget on those PC's. i.e. I want to setup a backup profile, tell it to backup to the account's PC every day @ 17:00 and not have to worry about it. basically, I won't want the staff to manually run the backups (since they forget, and tend to mess it up), and it should even run when they're not logged in, i.e. run as Windows service.



But, I want something that is free, since it's for a non-profit organization, so their budget is very tight.



Ideally, I'd like to get something which doesn't create one big archive, or propriatory image of the backup, but rather just copy the files across to the hard drive. Thus, if they need to restore a single file, they can just look for it on the backup drive. Many backup programs create big dump and then you need that particular program again to restore the backup. Differently put, let's say all the PC's got stolen / struck by lightning / flood / etc, and they urgently need a file(s), then it would be easier to just copy the file(s) from the USB drive, than having to try and remember which backup program they used, how it was setup, etc and then trying to figure out which files to restore to find a single file.



Can someone recommend something for me?
 
Have used Syncback many times and it will do everything you want.


I would personally however just use windows backup/Microsoft backup.

Share whatever needs to be backed up giving "mainbackuppc\username that will be used for backing up" full control, map the network drives and then set up windows backup on that machine to back up all the drives.

One cheap, centralised backup that will be easy to restore from.
 
Windows Backup has worked sucessfully for me, I have no complaints with it so far. Granted, there has been dead tapes etc, no fault of the backup program though.
 
shakes1 said:
Windows Backup has worked sucessfully for me, I have no complaints with it so far. Granted, there has been dead tapes etc, no fault of the backup program though.
Click to expand...

The problem I have with Windows backup, and the likes, is that it's propriatory. i.e. the client won't be able to restore the data on a Linux / MAC, if they wanted to. OR, if they have a Windows 7 PC, and needed to restore to an older Windows 2000 / XP PC, then it won't necessarely work. They've been down this road already and lost quite a lot of data from older PC's since the backup software they used on Windows 98 couldn't run on XP anymore and the only Windows 98 PC they still had packed up a few months ago. Windows 98 won't install on the newer hardware either.

Bottomline is I don't want something that is vendor, or OS locked.
 
www.mybackups.co.za from afrihost works for us, very cheap and it is attix. 5gb for important info is more than enough for each PC, plus it's offsite and backups are incremental so uses very litte bandwidth.
 
For serious rugged and reliable enterprise-class server and workstation backup (commercial paid software) it's hard to beat Acronis Backup & Recovery 10. There's also a lower-cost version for Microsoft SBS.
* On-the-fly backup of live server without shutting down apps or users (incl VSS)
* Full disk imaging of live machine - image can be restored to bare-metal machine in minutes rather than hours/days
* Restore the system to dissimilar hardware or VM with Universal Restore add-on.
 
Last edited:
I have to re-visit this thread since the backup solution I put in place doesn't work as well as I hoped.

I chose Comodo Backup since the interface is easy enough for the staff to understand and manage themselves.

The problem I now have is that I need better security for the backups. Currently all the user's data is being backed up to a shared folder on a Windows XP "server". It's a server with shared docs which everyone uses for various company documents. This Windows XP machine then gets backed up to another one, in a different building. So there's always 3 copies of every document on the network. I had to work with what the client had due to a limited budget.


The question is, does anyone know of a backup solution where I can setup different user accounts and secure each user's data individually? I know this is a typical Windows server type question, but the client doesn't want to fork-out the money for Windows server. And Linux, although it's my first suggestion, isn't option for them either. They need simplicity and don't want to use technology which someone else may not be able to take over and run with.


Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.

Many of the systems I found, start @ $599 for a server license, and then $50 per user licence which is simply too expensive for this client.

I don't need to backup Exchange, SQL, SharePoint or anything like that. Just files, documents, Pastel and emails - all which can be backed up without anything fancy.
 
A quality backup solution too expensive? I fear your client will one day learn the high price of not being able to recover from bad backups and poor backup/DR procedures. It's not just HDD failure that's an issue - it's fire, and especially theft. I can't tell you how many businesses I've spoken to that come back to the office on Monday morning to find all the servers gone. Can your client recover from that?
 
Why not put permission-based access on the folders,then use those accounts with syncback's copy profiles?

testnax.jpg
 
SoftDux-Rudi said:
I have to re-visit this thread since the backup solution I put in place doesn't work as well as I hoped.

I chose Comodo Backup since the interface is easy enough for the staff to understand and manage themselves.

The problem I now have is that I need better security for the backups. Currently all the user's data is being backed up to a shared folder on a Windows XP "server". It's a server with shared docs which everyone uses for various company documents. This Windows XP machine then gets backed up to another one, in a different building. So there's always 3 copies of every document on the network. I had to work with what the client had due to a limited budget.


The question is, does anyone know of a backup solution where I can setup different user accounts and secure each user's data individually? I know this is a typical Windows server type question, but the client doesn't want to fork-out the money for Windows server. And Linux, although it's my first suggestion, isn't option for them either. They need simplicity and don't want to use technology which someone else may not be able to take over and run with.
Click to expand...

You can have multiple users on Windows XP, the same as on server. The number of concurrent connections is limited to 20 though, which shouldn't be a problem.
 
Does anyone have any experience with smaller NAS devices, i.e. something with 2 drives that can cater for 14 PC's? I've only ever worked on large SAN's & NAS devices so I'm not sure how well these small ones operate with something like 14 PC's, which will backup to it on a daily basis.
 
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