hey, all you server admins! question for ya!

[Reese Tora]

So, I'm looking for some backup software for my company to use on our Windows 2003 server, just something that can schedule regular backups to portable hard drives and to a backup file server, and hopefully something user friendly enough that someone else will be able to work with it at whatever time I decide to move on to bigger companies.

I've been looking at Symantec's system restore software, and while I don't think much of their consumer antivirus, I'm willing to give their corporate backup software a try.  The easy restore features that they talk about are also enticing, but I don't have much experience with abckup software to know if that's soemthing I should even care about.

So, the question is, have any of you worked with this software, what do you think of it, and, is there any other backup software you guys would recommend?

Thanks for any advice you guys are willing to provide.

[Tapewolf]

Don't use Geniesoft backup, it is a total crock.  What it tends to do is work long enough for you to verify that it is working and then dies sometime later in such a way that subsequent backups cannot be read.  Fortunately we found this out by paranoia and not by having the building burn down.  Whatever software you use, make sure you can read things back off the tapes/disks/punchcards afterwards.

I can't say I'm as paranoid about this as I should be, but try and test the backups periodically to make sure it is still working.

I eventually gave up on using any form of backup software on Windows because quite simply, none of it worked.  I eventually commandeered our SVN server (Ubuntu) and made it also run nightly backups to DAT160 via flexbackup, which is basically a wrapper around TAR.  This does mean transferring the stuff from a share on the server.

Our solution is based around snapshotting the critical data such as Exchange, software releases, licensing data, user data and other stuff kept in a 'critical data' directory on 2003 - if you need to do a total machine snapshot that won't work, obviously.

On reflection this probably doesn't help much, but it might be an interesting comparison.

**EDIT**

Oh yeah, there's one really, really important thing to watch out for.  Make sure that the backup software is storing its indexes on the backup media.
Microsoft's wholly-unfit-for-purpose backup software and Geniesoft both store their indexes and other metadata on the hard disk and if it's lost, your backup may as well be blank.  Microsoft recommended storing it on a floppy disk which should be kept with the tapes etc.  They provide no way of reconstructing the indexes from just the backup media.

Geniesoft's software has a facility for reconstructing the index from the media but it does not work, which amounts to the same thing.  Also they have no way of identifying which index goes with which tape, so you have to insert the tape and go through each index one by one to try and find the one that matches the tape.

If you're not using a tape-based media, make sure you have multiple disks or some provision for taking different snapshots throughout the week.  I have a set of 5 tapes which we rotate and occasionally one is taken offsite though we don't really have a rota for doing that.

[Ryudo Lee]

I've used Veritas Backup Exec (now owned by Symantec) in a couple of it's different iterations, and still use it at my current job.  I find it to be a very simple and easy to use interface.  The only hangup is when you want to backup a remote server, then you start getting into licensing issues and stuff like that.  Otherwise, it's a great utility and includes tape series management and disaster recovery tools.

[RobbieThe1st]

DriveImageXML. Its simple, but great. It can backup a full running system(with the Windows VSS) or simply lock the volume; it can backup over the network to a share(I've done it) or locally; Backup scheduling is fairly easy to setup, and its at a good price(Free for non-commercial use, $20-$5 per license for commercial).

The one thing I haven't seen it do is tape backups; it -will- split its archive into sections(of any size) though, so you could have it back things up and then use a batch script(write, pause, write, pause) to write all of the pieces to separate tapes if needed.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

How is it for restoring? I note you say nothing about that...

[Tapewolf]

DriveImageXML. Its simple, but great. It can backup a full running system(with the Windows VSS) or simply lock the volume; it can backup over the network to a share(I've done it) or locally; Backup scheduling is fairly easy to setup, and its at a good price(Free for non-commercial use, $20-$5 per license for commercial).

Interesting.  Does it support backing up just a single directory?  Multiple servers?  Heterogeneous environments (e.g. will it also back up critical data on that Solaris/Linux/BSD/MacOS box over the network?)
More importantly and as llearch hints, can you restore only yesterday's marketing data in a new temp directory to get that one corrupted file back?

[Reese Tora]

Thanks for all the advice.

The setup that I'm aiming for will be to have an on-site file server and a minimum of two portable disks that will be taken off site (to my boss's house) so I can make weekly full backups and daily incrementals to both the file server and the portable disks (relys on my boss remembering to bring the drives with him from home every week, I'm sure that will break down in a month or two)

DriveImageXML. Its simple, but great. It can backup a full running system(with the Windows VSS) or simply lock the volume; it can backup over the network to a share(I've done it) or locally; Backup scheduling is fairly easy to setup, and its at a good price(Free for non-commercial use, $20-$5 per license for commercial).

Interesting.  Does it support backing up just a single directory?  Multiple servers?  Heterogeneous environments (e.g. will it also back up critical data on that Solaris/Linux/BSD/MacOS box over the network?)
More importantly and as llearch hints, can you restore only yesterday's marketing data in a new temp directory to get that one corrupted file back?

Well, it says it uses windows' shadow copy service, so one might assume it can be used to restore individual files, since shadow copy can do that, but that's a good question and best not to assume.  That's definitely a large drop in price from the $900 Symantec offering, though the licensing looks like it's meant to be installed on workstations since it comes in groups of 5.

While I'm working on this, one of my coworkers is building a file server that we are just going to manually copy files to, and I will probably use that for the server part of the setup I'm working out.