Backups Solution From WinDoze To Linux

Home » CentOS » Backups Solution From WinDoze To Linux
CentOS 17 Comments

My manager just tasked me at looking at this, for one team we’re supporting. Now, he’d been thinking of bacula, but I see their Windows binaries are now not-free, so I’m looking around. IIRC, Les thinks highly of BackupPC; comments on that, or other packaged solutions?

mark

17 thoughts on - Backups Solution From WinDoze To Linux

  • I’m sure others will chime in on BackupPC and the pro’s and cons, I will throw out what I am currently using for winblows machines and while its not open source it is Free and well supported. I have been looking for quite sometime and there are pros and cons to each software so it may or may not be a good fit for you, YMMV.

    http://www.veeam.com/endpoint-backup-free.html

    It’s not perfect but they are putting effort into and for me it has been working very well, my .01 for what its worth.

  • I don’t chime in very often but here it goes.

    I’m running BackupPC-3.3.1-1.el6.x86_64 on CentOS 6.6. The server is an HP ProLiant ML310e Gen8 v2 (dynamic p400 controller DISABLED); 8gb ram, 1.5tb raid1 . Boot/OS drive is an ssd and /var/lib/BackupPC is mounted on an LVM/RADI1 array. I’m currently backing up 41 pc’s and one Server 2011 Essentials.

    BackupPC Server Status

    General Server Information

    The servers PID is 37442, on host BackupPC, version 3.3.1, started at 7/13 16:20.
    This status was generated at 7/14 11:08.
    The configuration was last loaded at 7/13 16:20.
    PCs will be next queued at 7/14 14:00.
    Other info:
    0 pending backup requests from last scheduled wakeup,
    0 pending user backup requests,
    0 pending command requests,
    Pool is 530.20GB comprising 2040949 files and 4369 directories (as of 7/12 14:15),
    Pool hashing gives 1909 repeated files with longest chain 25,
    Nightly cleanup removed 5788 files of size 0.03GB (around 7/12 14:15),
    Pool file system was recently at 42% (7/14 11:02), today’s max is 42% (7/14 00:42) and yesterday’s max was 39%.

    Hosts with good Backups

    There are 42 hosts that have been backed up, for a total of:

    124 full backups of total size 4990.74GB (prior to pooling and compression),
    191 incr backups of total size 388.68GB (prior to pooling and compression).

    ** I just recently changed my setup to keep 3 full and 6 incremental backups so these numbers are in the process of growing **

    I USED to run various renditions of rsync and finally GAVE UP on it as it NEVER would backup up the Windows computers to my satisfaction. (rsync on linux rocks however)

    I finally switched over to using SMB to back up the Windows boxen. I use the admin account for this as creating a “BackupPC” user account assigned to the “backup operators” group wouldn’t even back up the boxes correctly.

    While not ideal security wise I CAN SAY I backup 42 computers every night, important files like outlook.pst GETS BACKED UP, and my BackupPC life is significantly easier.

    I use the following for the wakeup schedule: $Conf{WakeupSchedule} = [14,17];

    For backing up the BackupPC pool, I am running software raid. I use mdadm to attach a 3rd disk to the mirror which sync’s the mirror to the 3rd drive, then fail the 3rd disk and shrink the array back to two. Others have suggested Btrfs or zfs? For a send/receive backup method and I am going to try this as time allows.

    You can NEVER have too many backups. I’d slap it to tape if I could…

    Hopefully some of this information helps out…

    Regards,

    Richard

    –

  • Whatever you pick, test the restore to make sure you’re getting the system back to the state you expect it in. Without clearly understanding the restore liabilities, the backup strategy is incomplete.

    Starting with Windows 8, the system supports a fairly stateless system, so the system itself doesn’t need a full backup. Short of a dead drive, the built-in recovery volume can boot and fix pretty much any problem, including wiping system and boot volumes and restoring them to factory state. For a dead drive, then you need recovery media on something like a USB flash drive or external hard drive.

    Be sure to find out if the backup utility you pick actually backs up everything on the drive. Most of them will only backup and restore the boot and system volumes, not litany of partitions now on contemporary UEFI Windows 8.x computers: EFI system partition, OEM diagnostics partition, recovery partition, boot partition, system partition, and an IRST swap partition.

    My suggestion is to create USB recovery media using either the OEM
    tool for this purpose, or a decrapified install media from Microsoft:

    http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/save-yourself-from-your-oems-bad-decisions-with-a-clean-install-of-windows-8-1/
    http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/create-reset-refresh-media

    The Microsoft one arrives as an image. The OEM one usually doesn’t create an image, it creates a USB stick, so you’ll have to image it yourself and then keep a backup of the image. If you write zeros to the USB stick first, that image will be more compressible, if you intend to back it up with dd. I’ve also tested using dosfsck -v
    (fsck.vfat) to get details of the FAT file system the OEM tool creates and writes its files to. So I have a readme.txt that tells me how to format any USB stick properly, and then a tar of the recovery files which I untar onto the stick – and of course I’ve tested this recreated recovery stick all the way to a completed reinstallation of the OS. It saves some space and time in the end, but dd is fine too.

    From this point my Windows backups are terribly unsophisticated because I don’t have any really important data on it. But I think it’s a model to start from because it’s so brain dead easy. It depends entirely on an Outlook account. By default, Windows 8 wants you to create you user login with an Outlook account. You can lie and say you don’t have one, lie again and say you want to create one, and then at the bottom there’s a way to opt out and create a local only account that isn’t Outlook based. But if you do create an Outlook based account (or use AD I presume), all the relevant settings are backed up to the Microsoft cloud automatically. And when I do a completely clean install and sign back into this same Outlook account, all of it gets restored: settings, documents, pictures, everything.

    Problem A: lockin, proprietary, it’s Microsoft dependent. So you could use SAMBA 4 and AD all of this to avoid the Outlook part.

    Problem B: It’s a single point of failure. But if you could figure out a way to backup what Outlook is backing up to the cloud, and also figure out how to restore that – you’d work around this and not have to do these crazy monolithic backups and restores.

    I did a pile of these when doing Windows 8 + Fedora dual boot testing back in January and it’s very much like doing an Android/Cyanogen reset and restore from (cloud) backup if not easier and faster. I got the entire reformat, reinstall, restore down to less than 30 minutes.

    One could probably argue that only backing up the user directly in a conventional manner is sane, and just expect to never have to restore it unless the cloud backup-restore doesn’t work.

  • Am 14.07.2015 um 16:17 schrieb m.roth@5-cent.us:


    This will continue to be the case, and we have planned a number of projects that are sponsored by Bacula Systems. The will probably begin to appear in the community version between March and July of 2015.

    A few of these new features will be:

    1. Free Enterprise Windows binaries with all the latest features for individual community members.

    http://sourceforge.net/p/bacula/mailman/bacula-announce/?viewmonth 1501

  • Leon Fauster wrote:

    Sorry, your syntax has me slightly confused. Are you saying that it is the case that, in general, the Windows binaries will be pay-only?

    Which doesn’t help me at all, since a) I’m not in the bacula community, and b) this is for an agency of the US federal gov’t which shall remain nameless*, but whose budget is 20% *lower* than it was in 2003.

    mark

    * I do not represent myself as speaking for my employer, nor the US
    federal gov’t, nor the view out my window, assuming I had a window in this cube.

  • I would strongly recommend a product that supports VSS. Bacula does, and Veeam does as far as I can tell (mentioned by Tom). BackupPC does not. Without snapshots (VSS), you may back up inconsistent data, and you’ll miss backups of open files.

  • I use bacula to backup windows boxes. I do create full box image backup
    (using Windows image backup tool) every other year or so. As far as user data are concerned I rely on bacula (had to restore something they accidentally deleted or modified a couple of times – successfully). We don’t have many Windows boxes though, – about a dozen. We are mostly Linux, FreeBSD and Macintosh shop.

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • BackupPC does support pre- and post- backup scripts, so it is possible to implement backing up from vss. I’ve never done it, but there examples can be found

  • http://BackupPC.sourceforge.net/faq/limitations.html
    “So far, the best that BackupPC can do is send warning emails to the user saying that their outlook files haven’t been backed up in X days.
    (X is configurable.) The message invites the user to exit Outlook and gives a URL to manually start a backup.”

    So, no, it doesn’t look like that’s possible. There *is* a link on that page to an MSDN post which describes a script which can use VSS to copy individual files to a new location. However, there’s no integration with BackupPC, and there’s no identification of open files, so you need to know in advance which files might need to be copied with VSS.

    Don’t do that to yourself. Just use a backup program that supports VSS.

  • Veeam fully supports it, I don’t have as much time with this product since it pretty new, but its based on their server stuff which I have been using for years and it’s been solid. I have some really nasty window servers doing everything under the sun and they get backed up and replicated continuously, I don’t have as much time on this new offering but I am using it and so far so good.

  • Am 14.07.2015 um 19:00 schrieb m.roth@5-cent.us:

    sorry for the missing context: i just quoted from the URI below. Kern Sibbald stated that the win binaries will be provided for free.

    in the first post you (your manager) mentioned bacula as possible solution, therefore i came up with this information. So, the bacula packages are in the repositories :-).

  • My manager just tasked me at looking at this, for one team we’re supporting. Now, he’d been thinking of bacula, but I see their Windows binaries are now not-free, so I’m looking around. IIRC, Les thinks highly of BackupPC; comments on that, or other packaged solutions?

    We use Bareos extensively. By default, Bareos is Bacula-compatible. We use Bareos extensively.

  • What is the story between bareos and bacula? And why you prefer bareos as opposed to bacula. Just curios: I use bacula (it is bacula 5, server is FreeBSD, clients are CentOS 5,6,7, FreeBSD 9,10, Windows 7). Thanks for your insights!

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • What is the story between bareos and bacula? And why you prefer bareos as opposed to bacula. Just curios: I use bacula (it is bacula 5, server is FreeBSD, clients are CentOS 5,6,7, FreeBSD 9,10, Windows 7). Thanks for your insights!

    Story, as I understand it, is that the developer needed an incentive to get people to pay for a license, so closed distribution of the Windows File Daemon (the program that reads files and sends them off for storage, for those unfamiliar) so that only those who pay for a subscription can use it.
    (This is all perfectly legal.)

    Naturally, this pissed off people who couldn’t afford the license, but were already committed to their implementation.

    So…Bareos is a fork from the last open version of that code.

    As for why I use Bareos, I’d spent copious time studying Bacula’s manual and figuring out how to apply it. I was 80% of the way through implementation, complete with offsite backup of all my Linux hosts.

    And then I went to back up the Windows hosts. I was not happy.

    Took me only a day to rebuild it with Bareos.

  • I’ve tried bacula/bareos and they are horribly outdated in how they approach backups and only really useful if you use tape backups (because that’s the only target they were designed for).

    I’ve found obnam to be a good solution as it is lightweight, does de-deduplication (no full/incremental/differential nonsense) and can backup any sftp source. It’s not perfect but the best tools I’ve found so far.

    Regards,
    Dennis