# Linux/Windows backup solutions?

## mozingod

Anyone know of any good backup servers that'll run on Linux and backup Windows servers over the network to a tape drive? We're running a version of Arcserve for our ~ 75 servers now and it's nearing its end of life cycle, so we're looking for other options. I looked at Bacula, and while it seems pretty good, I thought I'd ask here first. Speed is a semi-concern as we do a full backup of about 100G/night, many of which consists of small (less than 30k) files. 

So I'm open for suggestions. Thanks!

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## mozingod

Nobody? Common, there has to be something out there...

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## bloatboy

If you wanna spend the money, both Legato Networker and Veritas NetBackup will work on Linux.  IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager (used to be called ADSM) might as well. Arkeia is another one but I have no personal experience with it.

ADSM was the most potent backup program I have ever seen, but the setup was very complicated and the program is geared for more of a tape silo than a regular changer.

Both ADSM and Legato will also support disk to disk (then to tape) backups. With ADSM, you reserve a portion of your disk space which "caches" the inbound data streams, then writes the cache to tape when it fills up. So you can have every server you are backing up going at the same time. For the Networker disk-to-disk-then-to-tape backup, Legato recommends you have more disk space on your backup server than you are actually backing up, so if you are doing 100G/night, and can cram a couple more cheap ass 120-250GB IDE drives on your backup server, your Windows servers backup time goes to pretty much nothing and the tapes get written out right from the backup servers disks.

I'm starting to confuse myself here so check these out:

Veritas NetBackup

Legato Networker

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

Arkeia

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## fryfrog

I do not admin the legato backup server for our company, but I work closely with the person who does and I frequently make use of it, trouble shoot issues with it and just generally deal with it.

I think it works like a champ.  It backups up our entire shared web hosting environment and custom servers to a large tape library system.  This is probably less than 100 servers but with more small files than I could ever care to imagine (picture 500+ webhosting customers on each server, each with their own files and stuff).

Another system with a simliar tape library and sun server running legato backs up our dedicated servers.  This is probably 400+ servers with data ranging from 9gb all the way to 600gb (or more) running redhat 6.0-8.0 or windows (2000, 2k3 and probably a few NT 4).

The client is intelligent and the server is configured fairly well here, it doesn't really need to do a full backup every day as a partial / incrimental works fine.  Of course, a weekly full backup is done too.  The scheduling is extrodinarily powerful as well.  The server actually does all the work, so everything is centralized.  You merely have to install the networker client (available for plenty of OSs with plenty of plugins for apps on those os's if needed) on every server you want backed up.

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## chris84ae

i use bacula, it has its limitations, but it does backup the machines on my network, easy to restore files, work in a similar fashion to veratis/tivoli. not sure about windows machines as i just backup the entire disk partition montlhy

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## johnmc

Netbackup is really great, especially if you you can use San Media Servers with Shared Storage options on the tape devices.

I inherited a mix of Networker, Arcserve, Jetserve, dump, tar, cpio and dd via rsh on a mix of over 100 Unix, Windows, Netware, OS/2 and VMS servers to a screwed up hairball of small tape libraries, single tape devices and disk storage - constant problems for Admins and Operators.

Netbackup plus two StorageTek L40 40-slot 4-drive libraries and about 180 LTO 2 400-600G tapes made the problems go away. The Vault options even duplicate the previous night's sessions and create off-site tapes automatically.

I highly recommend Netbackup, especially with the LTO2 drives and media.

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## zeromemory

Well, unless you want to make backup images of your system, you should consider rsync.

I use rsync to backup Windows fileservers. Every night, a script syncs the data on the Windows servers to a Linux backup server. Once the files are on the Linux server, another script tars them up and copies them over to a tape drive.

cwRsync provides a nice port of rsync to Windows.

http://everythinglinux.org/rsync/ and http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/ are also good rsync resources.

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