Hey, I just finished a server and want it to start backing up computers on the network. The server is of course a Linux server with about 1.1TB of useable storage for backing up. But I want to try and automate the backup process as much as possible. For the most part, there are systems on the network that share their entire drives and partitions with password access, so there are a lot of files to move. However, I only want the files that are copied to take forever once. This means that after all the files are moved over, any time I do another backup, it needs to check the date the file was last modified automatically and determine if the file going over is newer or not. So basically, any time in the future, when I run this backup script, I want it to copy over files that don't exist on the server yet because they are new, and overwrite old files with the newer ones on the workstations.

Is there any available scripts out there that just need slight modifications to work? Currently, I am just moving files over as such:

mount -t smbfs -o username=userforpc //pcname/c$ /mnt/pcname/C_Drive
password:

mkdir /storage/failsafe/pcname_system_backup/C
cp -frv /mnt/pcname/C_Drive/* /storage/failsafe/pcname_system_backup/C/

So pretty much, I want to be able to customize source and destination for certain folders, and then have it copy only the files necessary, being new or modified files.

rsync would be your best bet:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ticle&artid=80

Just took a peek. Does it absolutely need to have an SSH pipe? The server is one of the very few systems in the office running under Linux, and the rest of the workstations are a mixture of Windows NT4 and Windows XP systems.

No, you can mount the remote share and run rsync locally. This does reduce your security slightly and remember that it is possible to run an ssh server on windows.

ok, so basically using rsync to replace cp in this case would work? Prety much like:

rsync -avz /mnt/pcname/C_Drive/ /storage/failsafe/pcname_system_backup/C/

Since it is copying from windows you can't back the permssions so just use:
rsync -rtl /path/to/src /path/to/dst