Can anyone tell me the most simple and robust way to run automated backups on a Linux machine. It has to be robust, quick, and precise to be a workable solution. I have seen things like Amanda tape, but I still can not thread things together coherently to develop a administration guide for our corporate IT dept.

The reason for this is because I am thinking of dropping MSExchange and using ZIMBRA for our production environment.

Thanks.

Cool that you are making that change.

Your question is close to being like asking "what's the best distribution of linux" without even indicating any particular needs or uses that it will be put to. There will be a lot of opinions and no one right answer.

I like Amanda, but you haven't provided much information about your needs or environment.

If you look through http://www.linuxquestions.org/bookmarks/tags/backup, you will find several links to information about Amanda (the open source network backup application) and Zmanda (the company that provides commercial support for Amanda). If you are talking about an administrative guide, I presume that will get into backup policies. You may also want to take a look at the book http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596102463/, and/or the companion web site http://www.backupcentral.com/.

Its not free, but is is great on Linux

We need to find ways to cut costs in our IT dept. We have worked out that exchange costs each employee about US$400 per desktop per year in licensing and support. From a production standpoint, MSexchange is relatively easy to run. Most issues we have are actually on the client outlook side.

MSExchange server is easy because...

1. Backups are automated and unattended. It integrates with NTBackup.exe well and is very reliable.
2. Restore is a simple 2 step process, a) install the base OS, b) recover the information store.
3. We can recover an exchange server in about 5-6 hours. That would include reformatting the hdd, installing windows again, and restoring the system state. That takes about 1-2 hr. Most time is used in restoring the mailboxes which our 50GB store takes about 3-4 hrs. From a business perspective this is fine if it occurs only once per year (99% uptime).

In actual fact the only time in the last 3 years exchange has failed for us was because the information store was full. The whole server crashed and the service was out for more than 24 hours. We had to use the exchange util to compress the store, which took 15 hours. This has left a sour taste in my mouth ever since. As the administrator in charge of the messaging services, I have since looked for alternatives away from exchange.

In addition, i want to get rid of the outlook client. It uses up too much of our support time. Anyway users are willing to move to a web based solution, and are even demanding it.

I have checked Zimbra. It seems to hook into the active directory from the get go. It has a very rich client that comes through the web browser. But I want to make sure that supporting it from an administrators view very low cost. I can achieve that if I can deliver a reliable 99.9% uptime service.

Your title is Linux in a Production Environment, your original question was about backup, now your last post on the thread is totally focused on moving from exchange to something else. You might get better response if you had focused threads with appropriate titles.

I responded to the linux backup question, but I have no idea about exchange or zimbra (other than that I avoid anything Microsoft like the plague ), and I might not have looked at your message titled Linux in a Production Environment except that it was a 0 response thread at the time. I can say that Linux has made huge headway into corporate production environments in the last 10 years, and is still gaining momentum. All the major vendors of hardware who have their own Unix OSes offer Linux configured hardware as an alternative. I think Microsoft is maybe the only major company in the industry that hasn't embraced linux .