Differential Backup Solution

BloomerzUK

BloomerzUK

BloomerzUK

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Joined
3 Jan 2006
Posts
2,073
Location
Bishopsworth, Bristol
Hi All,

Not sure if this is the best place to post this. Don, move if necessary.

I have had a nightmare in work with Backups recently, and on top of that the network cabinet falling off the wall ripping Cat5's out from the upstairs office.

My question is, is there any free software out there that can run on a machine that can do differential backups daily (just files modified or created) with a full backup each week? I know there is FreeNAS, but I'm not sure if this has the functionality.

We plan to make a box with a few TB drives in there, as we've used Western Digital NAS drives before and they fail.

Any help would be much appreciated. If you need any more info, let me know.

Cheers,
 
What sort of data are you backing up? If you're not backing up Exchange/SQL databases or live VMs, you could do it quite easily with something like robocopy. If you do need to back up such files (including open files) then you will need some proper backup software - the only one I have recent experience with is Backup Exec. Whether that is suitable or not rather depends on your budget.
 
Hi Saundie,

It's a myriad of files, mainly standard office files plus pics and some media. Nothing as complex as SQL or Exchange server stuff. We don't have a huge budget, but I'd say sub £300.
 
Backup Exec is going to be too expensive, in that case, but that's fine as it's almost certainly going to be overkill for what you want to achieve anyway. What are the files you're backing up stored on at the moment? Are they on a Windows server, or a Linux based NAS, or are they all over the place?

With any luck somebody else will be able to suggest some suitable software for you, because unfortunately the only package I've used professionally is Backup Exec (apart from ArcServe, but that was bloody awful). My suggestion of a robocopy script isn't the most elegant solution (it won't give you much in the way of reporting, for example)...
 
By the way, how much data have you got to back up? An online storage solution might work well for you, as long as you've not got terabytes of changes to upload each night.
 
Around 750GB~ - I suppose about a maximum of 1GB of files are created/modified each working day. We've dabbled in online storage before (Strato and Wuala) but our bandwidth limitations don't permit it.
 
BloomerzUK said:
Hi All,

My question is, is there any free software out there that can run on a machine that can do differential backups daily (just files modified or created) with a full backup each week? I know there is FreeNAS, but I'm not sure if this has the functionality.
Click to expand...

Handy Backup does that. Try to find the 5th version - it's free.
Handy Backup 7 trial version is also capable of differential and full backups at any schedule you set, but this one lasts only 30 days.
 
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