Windows 7 notebook backup
 

Funny subject I know for a Linux Questions forum. :) I am trying to figure out the best method or most efficient method to backup several Windows 7 notebooks.

Here is a little background. I have about 20 different Offices in 5 different states. Each Office has anywhere from 5 to 15 different users. In each Office I have a Desktop with a Quad core processor, 8GB of RAM, and 1TB disk. I am running SUSE with squid for WCCP web caching.

I was thinking about setting up Samba shares but don't really want to manage all the shares when the users terminate or new hires are brought in. I was looking for a simple way to backup specific directories on these Windows 7 notebooks to the SUSE Linux server and the rsync the backups back to a central server which would be backed up to tape. I was also considering CrashPlan since it appears to constantly backup the file but I didn't see where I could customize the installation to preselect the directories to backup. If I couldn't figure out an automated way to install a client to backup specific directories my next thought was use something where I can apply quotas to limit how much space the users would get to store their backups.

Thoughts?

I've used cobian backup for similar situations, although we only have 1 office. Each client gets a cobian installation that backs up the user directories to a server. That server then backups up to removable storage.

If you've got a Linux box at each location, I'd suggest a tiered solution, that doesn't rely on much user intervention:

• Samba on the Linux server, with two shares for each user: public (for group-sharing), and private (their own files). These would map to consistent drives for each user, so they'd know that the F: drive is always the public share, and the G: drive is always their own.
• Set the Windows systems up to use the Windows backup utility, and get their "Documents" and "Desktop" folders each day, backing them up to their own shares. This will get the users that don't listen (90+%?) and work off their C: drives. Set it to run every night at a certain time, and if it's not run, have it run in the morning when they turn their machines on, first thing.
• Tell the users that they REALLY need to work from the network drives, if at all possible, to make sure things are backed up. If they can start avoiding sneakernet with USB sticks to get files between each other, they'll start.
• Each night, do an rsync over the WAN back to the central server, with each remote server going into a separate directory for each site
• Back up central server with tape and whatever you want.

If you've already got a Linux box at each site and an WAN, it should be fairly easy.