Hi at work we have a network with all windows pcs and as a network share and Back up option I have planned to make a samba server probably running on slackware 10.1. that should not be to much of a problem to setup basic shares. I also plan to setup different users and groups with different access levels all to be password protected.

what I am considering though is back up options for the shares, what I was thinking about doing is using another windows pc and adding a slave drive perhaps making a complete mirror of the samba server drive or just the shares I plan on ordering 2 identical drives the reason for this is the majority of all work will be laid on the samba server and I want to make sure the back up is not on the same PC. I was planning on using rsysnc but I am worried about people being able to have complete read write access to the network backup drive sense it is on a windows pc. so I have a few questions i would like to ask they are as follows

1. is there a good method of using rysync with some other encryption program that can make good back ups that can be restored easily

2. I was wondering how effective users groups and passwords will be on the samba shares ( will windows save the password and never ask for it again by default) if so will other user accounts on the same windows drive have access to.

3. has anyone ever tried using some sort of script cron job that actually backs up the entire system completely mirroring it ( this may not be a good option if someone deletes a file on there samba share and it is then mirrored and removed off the back up).

in general any resources to do with network backup scripts and samba + win file permissions would be greatly appreciated.

cheers amd thanks in advance

Right Now we have a system that has one samba share on it and another server that is Novell 3.2. I have a windows workstation that is logged on with a special user id that has root access and has the network shares mapped to drive letters. The system has a large size D:\ drive and an even larger external USB drive connected. I created a program that creates dated folders on the D:\ drive and the uses some XCOPY commands to copy the data from the network volumes to folders within the dated folder and then from the D:\ drive over to the USB drive. If you use the correct options on the XCOPY command you can get all hidden and system files but not have it bomb during the copy. I use /S/H/C/Y. This method provides several benefits IMHO 1) two copies of the server files on two separate hardware devices, 2) several external USB drives can be used in a rotation schedule for off-site and archive backups 3) having dated folders in your archive helps make it easier to retrieve a file from a certain date