This must be asked all the time but I cant find anything that backs up everything the way im familiar with on a windows server. recommendations?

Arkeia looks to be pretty much what i'm looking for just not sure if it will restore EVERYTHING. I also have heard of arcserve of course but not sure if it behaves this way on linux.

Things like DAR and tar look great for just the data, and we might be forced to use just that due to costs, but wondering if theres anything else out there
(open source would be great but not necessary in this case).

Specifically what I'm looking for is something that will backup restore all user accounts, samba /apache/php mysql ,etc

What would be ideal is if there was a disaster and I had to restore: something wherein I would just have to recreate the partitions and mount points adequately sized, install the backup software and restore all.

any tips appreciated , thanks much!

Matt

Maybe create your own script if it's not too hard

mattl, I deployed a Redhat Enterprise Linux FileServer for a client a few months back with Novastor backup software. Go to www.novastor.com and look at novanet 9 for Linux.

The prices are reasonable I believe I paid $439.00 with unlimited linux servers/workstations backups and unlimited Windows workstation backups and it has the look and feel of Veritas Backup Exec..

Tell me what you think once you download the Trial release and test it out

Bacula is a complete (Open Source) client-server backup system:

http://www.bacula.org/

thanks folks, going to try a few of these,

well here i am FINALLY implementing this. Im using a sony atapi drive and it works quite well (fc4) with tar and is alot quicker than the usual tape drive access im used to with arcserver or BE. I suppose that is because a lot less is going on (compression, etc).

I have played with arkeia without a tape drive (looks fine) and have been looking around casually at others. here's my thoughts: its a very small office and the most import thing is to backup the main fileshare of all of their files. theyr'e all even using the same username to login on their current windows peer to peer network. I am thinking Ill probably stay with just tar (free!) in this case as i want something that will be the quickest restore of files, and it seems just straight tar would be the thing.

unless i went with some of the packages that come with bare metal recovery, but this is a small nonprofit so i need to keep it cheap/free (not sure if any of the free ones have a quick distaster recovery option (ie with boot disk/cd)?

re: tar whats the best most universal method of using compression with it and what are concerns ? (what i mean is safe, easily restored). i hope these arent overly obvious questions - i've not used a tape drive on linux before yesterday. thanks folks!!

dar is my favorite backup program. However keep in mind that backing up things like databases is best done by using the provided backup scripts or at minimum dumping the database. <i>In a pinch</i> you can re-mount a MySQL database restored from a filesystem-only backup (I had to do this once), but you WILL have to run the integrity check and repair utilities against it before you go live to be assured all transactions are reconciled - and you CAN lose a record or two (from pending transactions) in the process. However even that worst-case scenarion is far superior than the worst-case scenario you'd be encountering in the Windows world.

How I back up:

I maintain a /backups directory where the backups get dumped and archived, before being copied to other servers on the network. /backups is a read-write samba share (the archival servers store the files in secured directories).

scripts dump MySQL databases into /backups/sql, then rolled into a tar file and bzipped (daily)
scripts drive a daily backup of /srv and certain /var directories (and other data locations)
scripts back up /etc and other configfuration directories

All this gets rolled into a dar file, and then two remote servers make copies for archival in secured directories. Every few weeks I make a copy (well, two copies of each) on optical media. All backup files are named by date.

thanks I will do some checking to see whasts different with dar vs tar. yes I know what you mean about the db backups (though i admit no knowledge on diag/test tools available with mysql, need to learn that!). for my home based stuff i dump mysql db's daily, then copy to another machine, separating various archives for history. i frequesntly move the sites to different machines, so i have the restore procedures down pat with all of my LAMP apps. glad you mentioned it though as i am probably going to setup a a little wiki for them "just because" and ill incorporate its backup much like what you describe, thanks!