Greetings all,

My company currently uses a custom backup system to do its incremental backups. This works well for the most part, though our windows is limited to backing up windows shares only really. Biggest problem is that it's a pain in the bum to configure. We have several backup servers, each with their own array.

Adding a simple linux server to be backed up, requires logging into both the backup server and the client server, setting up ssh keys etc, the client side script etc.

All of this is annoying, long, and honestly it's outdated. I've been trying to research a decent open source backup system that runs on linux but can connect to both linux and windows machines. (We have a solaris box or two but not many.)

I'm looking for something with relatively ease of central management, incremental backups with options of compression, and preferably a form of remote restoring. If you have used something that you think might be useful, please let me know and I'll research it. I appreciate all the help.

Thanks,
Bez

I've been happy with a small installation (1 "server", 10 or so clients) of Bacula. Meets all of your requirements *except* that adding a new client requires access to both client and server. I'm not aware of any systems that don't. (There are Windows systems that fake by creating a default share of every disk when creating the client system, but that seems like a bad bad idea to me.) Bacula is true client/server - the WIndows client knows about all the Windows specific stuff needed to do correct backups, ditto the Unix client.

(I quoted "server" above because the Bacula "server" is in multiple parts. Of particular interest is that the "Storage Daemon" can be multiple machines/arrays/tapes/whatevers.)

Initial configuation is non-trivial, but that's true of any system of this type. The Bacula documentation is quite good, though, as are the examples and the mailling list.[url][/url]

_________________
The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world.
-- seen on the net

Thanks Steve. Bacala might be what I'm looking for. I don't mind SOME client configuration, but the amount required by my current software is ... insane.

It would be nice to have some type of setup where I can just add the client to the image, and just tweak our imaging server script to tweak the config file during the imaging.

I'll check it out. Thanks!

Steve, you are officially the man.

Bacula is almost exactly what I'm looking for. i'm doing some testing and if the few limitations it has are equal to or less than our current backup system, I might be able to convince them to change over and make all of our lives 10x easier.

Thanks again!