which Backup Software?

Question

I need to use a backup software that can backup windows server to a Linux server out side the network (the cloud)!

so far I came through the following:

Handy Backup Professional 6.7 Backup4all Professional 4.4 BatchSync Secure 3.0

what I need is,

• Possibility to backup to SSH(SFTP) or better RSYNC over SSH
• full,differential, incremental
• possibility to limit the backup snapshots history by size or numbers? like the total backup (snapshots) will not go over some ... GB or/and not more than 4 snapshots

here is another thing what I think as an "ideal" backup system is to have

yearly (yearly archive), monthly (last 12 moths), weekly (last 2 or 3 weeks), daily (last 7 days)

I know it is all depend on the data type and the storage that I have

so is there any one who can advice me for for a good backup program (one of the above or any other)? good backup strategy?

thanks

Answer 1

You're on superuser, so i'm going to recommend Mozy. Their version 2.0 puports to be pretty cool: it backs up locally and then backups up to their servers. Carbonite is their big competitor, they may have a similar offering. Both offer professional level services.

If this is for a big business and has to be handled in house, i'll just point you at serverfault.com.

If you've already looked at these services and just have to Do-It-Yourself, then I don't know enough to help you. (but someone else surely will come along shortly.) I've only used a free version of Acronis that came w/ my seagate drive. But i hear the full version is the bee's knees.

That said, I'm a big fan of not re-inventing the wheel and suggest giving these services a second look. They offer all the security and snap-shotting you wanted, and are pretty darn low priced.

Answer 2

You might want to take a look at BackupPC. We use it to backup Windows 2003/2008 servers to a group of Linux servers using rsync over ssh with the CwRsync package on the Windows servers

Answer 3

You might consider Amazon S3 as well for your backup solutions. The price is pretty comparable to rolling your own or using a third party service.

I'll admit that depending on how you want to snapshot your machine/servers/databases might affect the feasibility using Amazon S3. I'm not sure if you want to be able to pull a single file from a backup two weeks ago, or simply drop an image from back then onto a fresh/virtual machine and work from there.

There are a lot of tools and scripts emerging out there to integrate with Amazon S3, and one of them might exactly what you need. Similarly, you can use the existing documentation to roll your own.