Hi everyone,

What I need to do is set up a small office network with two PC's running WinXP and a third as a server/ automatic file back up running some flavor of Linux.

So mainly looking for suggestions and tips as to what would be a good Linux distro to work as a file server but also to make automatic data back ups of certain files (Excel speadsheets mainly) and other critical documents for this office.

I'm going to have two spanking new windows machines and an older machine with a new HDD to act as the server/back up.

Any suggestions and/or tips are gratefully appreciated.

That's a pretty broad question, especially if you are coming into it blank. What you choose will depend a lot on what you are comfortable with, what you want to do in the way of backups. Which distribution you choose is one question, what you want to accomplish with backups is another question, and then what software and hardware to use are two more. And there are lots of options for all of those.

There is an O'Reilly book on the topic http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596102463/index.html, and Curtis Preston, the author, has a companion website http://www.backupcentral.com/

That book focuses on open source software, with some mention of commercial options.

You can also browse through some of the links here http://www.linuxquestions.org/bookmarks/tags/backup

If you want some particular suggestions, then probably every respondent will have some different suggestion. For your particular setup, maybe take a look at BackupPC. It's probably not worth it to get into the enterprise class products unless you really need them and are willing to go the extra mile to learn them and get them set up. But, you'll have to tell us a little more about what you want.

I second the BackupPC suggestion. I put it on tons of machines, and backup windows clients using the rsyncd method. I use rsync + ssh for linux, which is extremely fast, and hyper secure over ssh with keys.

Peace,
JimBass