What would people recommend in terms of a cheap but reliable hardware and software solution for backing up data from a FC2 installation. The installation in question will be FC2, running Samba, and using about 10-20 GB space.

Something which is easy to use, widely used, and compatible with FC2 would be good.

Oh, I think I'd prefer an external device, too.

And if the h/w, s/w combo could backup files from an old NT4 box over the network, too, that would be ultragreat.

Recommendations?

I use a external Seagate Travan 20/40 GB drive. Works ok for me.

Not tried it over a network. As it's USB I just plug it into the machine I'm backing up.

AK

Sounds good, aikempshall. Any views on software that's easy to use (and open source)?

The guy who will be operating this is not very technical, so something basic, simple, idiot-proof, would be cool. Only full backups will be needed, no fancy incremental/ differential stuff..

Regards,
Supergrapeman.

I've only ever used tar for backups/restore which is not necessarily the best for a non-technical person.

I believe there are GUI solutions, like kbackup, but I've never tried them. Perhaps someone else has some experience with them.

AK

If you have some money to spend, buy a dedicated machine to act as your backup server. Load it down with hard drives so you have tons of space at your disposal. If you don't wanna mess with adding another machine, just add another hard drive to your existing machine.

I use rsync for backing up. This is not so good in compression, but with tons of hard drive space, who cares! You can tell rsync to ignore certain file types (like zip, exe or whatever you want) and you can have workable copies of the data you want to restore. For example, instead of having to use some software to decompress the backup and extract what you want, you can browse directly to the data and simply mv or cp the file back to where it belongs! If your main hard drive blows up, you can just mount the data you backed up.

Yeah, backing up to another m/c is okay, but what do you do when the building burns down?

You gotta store backups offsite.

THanks for the tip about rsync, though