Corporate Backup Solution?

F

Fred Hebert

I am looking for a backup solution for Win2003 server and XP
Workstations. We currently have 3 locations and 3 servers (after
Katrina) but in about a month we will have everyone (~30 people) back in
our main office except one small satellite office (5-7 people).

My desire it to do incremental workstation backups to the local server
and to backup the server every night.

This is similar to what we had before, but that product is no longer
available. Users could set their own backup schedule and could restore
files themselves. The server maintained the last several versions of a
file so you could go back to the version of a file from last week if you
needed to.

From an admin app we could see the last backup dates for all workstations
to be sure that people were doing regular backups.

The only problem we had was backup capacity (hardware) and this has been
rectified, but the software that we switched to after Katrina doesn't
meet our needs.

There is no workstation user interface so users can't do anything for
themselves. It backups up the workstations to the backup media which is
changed daily, so even if there was an interface the data would not be on
line.

I really liked being able to manage my own backups and because
workstation backups were always differential they ran FAST! Usually my
daily backups were 10 minutes or less while I was at lunch.

The product we were using was Veritas NetBackup (I think). Like I said I
am not happy with our professional paid for solution so we/I am going to
do it myself. I guess if you want something done right you have to do it
yourself!

Oh, I almost forgot there must be a "bare metal" restore capability.
That's what actually triggered this search. We had a drive failure and
it took 3 days of pain to restore the system. In the past a drive
failure wouldn't have taken 3 hours to restore. Just boot from the
recovery CD, partition, format, restore and reboot. No goofy problems
with SIDs and lost profiles.

Has anyone had any good experiences?
 
O

Opus

How about Symantec LiveState Recovery Suite. It will do everything you said
including scheduled backups to server file systems and bare metal recovery
when required.

Opus
 
M

Malke

Fred said:
I am looking for a backup solution for Win2003 server and XP
Workstations. We currently have 3 locations and 3 servers (after
Katrina) but in about a month we will have everyone (~30 people) back
in our main office except one small satellite office (5-7 people).

My desire it to do incremental workstation backups to the local server
and to backup the server every night.

This is similar to what we had before, but that product is no longer
available. Users could set their own backup schedule and could
restore
files themselves. The server maintained the last several versions of
a file so you could go back to the version of a file from last week if
you needed to.

From an admin app we could see the last backup dates for all
workstations to be sure that people were doing regular backups.

The only problem we had was backup capacity (hardware) and this has
been rectified, but the software that we switched to after Katrina
doesn't meet our needs.

There is no workstation user interface so users can't do anything for
themselves. It backups up the workstations to the backup media which
is changed daily, so even if there was an interface the data would not
be on line.

I really liked being able to manage my own backups and because
workstation backups were always differential they ran FAST! Usually
my daily backups were 10 minutes or less while I was at lunch.

The product we were using was Veritas NetBackup (I think). Like I
said I am not happy with our professional paid for solution so we/I am
going to
do it myself. I guess if you want something done right you have to do
it yourself!

Oh, I almost forgot there must be a "bare metal" restore capability.
That's what actually triggered this search. We had a drive failure
and
it took 3 days of pain to restore the system. In the past a drive
failure wouldn't have taken 3 hours to restore. Just boot from the
recovery CD, partition, format, restore and reboot. No goofy problems
with SIDs and lost profiles.

Has anyone had any good experiences?

Look at Acronis' corporate solutions. They have programs that will do
exactly what you want.

http://www.acronis.com

Malke
 

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