[lug] Backing up windows servers to Linux tape

[Nate Duehr]

jhswope wrote:
> Oh wise and powerful linux users group,
> 
> I pose a query of deep significance.  I am adding a new Linux server 
> with tape library to my humble and meager office.  All praise to the 
> Lords of Finance.  The company has moved a group of Windows users to our 
> location who will be using a Windows Domain server (cursed are the 
> Daemons of Human Resources).  I will need to backup this server.  Any 
> suggestions for the best and most complete package to ease and speed the 
> backups?
> 
> May you lead interesting live and may Bill Gates never cross your 
> threshold.

Is there an MS-SQL server on the Windows machine?  If not, the 
suggestion someone else made of scripting something together with Samba 
might be appropriate.  If you have an SQL database that can't be taken 
off-line periodically for backups, you'll need another solution -- many 
out there.

My employer uses some software from the UK called NetVault.  It seems to 
be trying to compete on the low-end with people like Veritas.

I can say that it does do cross-platform backups of Linux, Sun, and 
Windows machines including special plug-ins for SQL databases, open-file 
management, etc -- pretty well.  The GUI is pretty but somewhat 
frustrating and dealing with their internal scripting language or 
command-line tools is even harder -- but it is cheaper than many of the 
"Enterprise class" solutions out there, while offering very similar 
features.

We run the "main" server on Linux, and have a "slave" server off-site. 
There is a client GUI for Windows, and at the time, not for Linux, but 
xVNC to the "main" server took care of that.

It's probably WAY too much money for a departmental server or small 
server farm, but if you have a LOT of stuff to get to tape, it handles 
changers/robots just fine and has features to do simulated 
changers/robots to disk if you have enough space.

www.bakbone.com for info.

I highly recommend purchasing through a VAR who can help you get through 
the steep learning curve on the front-end.  Xdata Corp. in Denver sells 
it, and they did a good job of helping us through our first installation 
and explaining the odd terminology in the screens -- expecially since 
7.0 had just come out when we installed and we decided to go with the 
newer version.  (The printed documentation apparently lags behind, and I 
found a few discrepancies in the printed manual where someone had just 
cut and pasted from the 6.4 manual and not really checked it... enough 
that I didn't fully trust the manual at that time.)

Getting backup jobs set up is tedious via a GUI, but once they're set up 
and running, monitoring them and doing restores (even to different 
boxes) is extremely simple.

Prior to having this software, backups were done from an old rusty shell 
script that did dumps to the tape-changer... it was much more painful 
than this...

Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com