A program I like for Windows is Syncback. You can find it with a quick google search. SyncbackSE is much better, but costs $$, but the freeware version of Syncback is very handy for backing up people that just need a folder (aka. My Documents …and subfolders) backed up.

Well, the Veritas version we have has no Symantec branding. It works spectacularly as it is, so we haven’t really been upgrading it or anything. It’s a great product.

Sadly judging from Symantec’s track record, they probably totally fucked it up by now. :(

Thanks for the clarification – so NTbackup does the restoring too.

I used Veritas at a prior job, it really was great. Support was terrific, the
product was terrific, so were the prices – but it was worth it. I hope nothing
has changed since they were bought out by Symantec.

[quote comment=”6703″]What do you like about NTBackup over Unison? I haven’t been able to play with either yet.[/quote]

Actually, the main difference is that ntbackup works more like tar than like rsync/unision. It rolls everything into a single file which in someways makes backups easier to manage, but also makes it more vulnerable to data corruption.

I do use unision for small nightly backups of important folders. The big weekly backups are ntbackup – not sure why. Force of habit I guess – it just seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

On some servers at work we use Veritas which is a very nice suite with some useful features. For example it sends a text message to my phone if the backup failed or something.

I’d never heard of Unison – from the quick look I’ve given, it looks awesome. That’ll save me some time next time I want to set someone up with rsync.

What do you like about NTBackup over Unison? I haven’t been able to play with either yet.

Time Machine is a backup app on the brand new Apple OS. It does 2 things
– it acts as an api for those creating apps for 10.5 who want auto backup built into their app
– and it acts as a full backup system for the entire OS (your data & OS)
It does versioning, incremental backups, undelete*, etc. Of course you can set it to only backup data. Unfortunately I haven’t seen capability to backup to anything other than external local drives, and local shares done by 10.5 machines (no backing up to a smb/nfs share, and no tunneling over ssh).

* Undelete has been one of my biggest complaints about Macs. You empty the trash, if there was something there, you are hosed. Nothing gets it back reliably. Not diskwarrior, not data rescue II (usually), not norton utilities, nothing.

Btw, have you ever used Unision? Does pretty much what you would want rsync to do, but is available as a native windows binary so you don’t really have to do a full cygwin install. You can schedule it via the standard windows Task Scheduler instead of cron.

I use NTBackup on my windows box and rsync on linux. :)

Time Machine is the Apple thing, right? I haven’t used OSX that much so I’m not very familiar with it, but I think I heard it mentioned here and there.

Oh, and the security center thing is brilliant! I never thought about that, but you are right – having something like that would force people to get backup software installed and configured just to get that red shield go away.

I installed cygwin on my parents computer, and between cron & rsync they don’t have to touch anything ever again. I just had them backup an another local drive, though I guess an offsite rsync over ssh solution would be better.

But you’re right, if the hard drive they use failed, I’d be tech support. So it took me 15 minutes of prevention to save myself potentially hours of fixing.

Which is why I’m so pleased with Time Machine. Time machine in 10.5 completely blows any backup utility Microsoft has provided out of the water, especially the new one on Vista.

Personally, I think the Windows security center thingy that monitors a firewall, AV, and something else (I forget what) should also monitor backups in the same way – meaning you can turn the notifications/reminders off if you want, to your own peril.