Hi All,

Our office IT has grown such that our current method of backing up data to a removable HDD using the Nero BackItUp utility is very time consuming and cumbersome (you can't retrieve single files from the backup if needed).

I would like people opinions of a good quality backup program that is suitable for running on a Server 2003/XP Pro network that can be scheduled to run during the night and that if you need to retirieve a single file that can be done without restoring an entire backup.

Cheers Matt

Re: Backup software

Hi Matt,

Have look at this

http://www.backupassist.com/BackupAssist/index.html

It uses NT Backup which is part of Windows server/XP It will backup Exchange & has a SQL server add on

Price = $217 inc GST

Re: Backup software

Dear Matt,

This may not be exactly what you are looking for but I have found this very effective.

Using Nero 7.2.0.3 (Nero Express) I make an ordinary data disk with the files to back up, next time when you start the "Make data disk" facility again all the files on the CD compilation which have been altered are bolded ready to be burnt again all other files are greyed out. If you don't wish to add more files then just hit the "Burn" and it will only burn the altered files. Naturally you can add more files if you wish.

I have tested this by altering only one fullstop and Nero found the change as described above

Re: Backup software

Hi

I work at a high school and what we use is Robocopy. It's FREE from Microsoft and comes with XP or server 2k3 in the resource tools. You can download it from Mcrosoft too. There is a gui you can use with it just google robocopy gui.

After a backup is done if you need to do a restore you can easily retrieve files with windows explorer (copy and paste). We schedule robocopy with the Task Manger in Server 2K3 but you can do it on an XP box to. All you need to do is creatre a batch file with something like robocopy SOURCE DESTINATION /OPTIONS in it and set it to run as a task. There is a manual that you can download which has all the options and syntax info.

Robocopy has saved our users (students) heaps of times and it is quick. Download the resource tools which contain robocopy from here -

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&DisplayLang=en

and the docs can be found in the robocop.doc which will be in the download.

Hope this helps

Nev

Re: Backup software

Thanks everyone that responded.

The CD/DVD option wouldn't be suitable as I will be baking up in the order of 100G of data, hence a lot of DVD's and very time consuming.

I had a look at Robocopy and did some reading up but found that it was the most user friendly solution as it took quite a while to configure and even with the GUI, you need the manual regularly.

I was very impressed with BackUpAssist. They offer a full version trial download with 30 days access. The software use the NT Backup coding so it should remain compatible with future versions of Windows, which some other proprietary softwares may not. The interface is very easy to use and it most importantly, you can set it up to either e-mail or print a report out advising whether the backup was succesful or not. I did have a glitch during the first trial backup in that it was unable to perform a backup of the entire system state. The error code was not in their troubleshooting guide but they have a small utility that capture the backup settings and logs and you e-mail it to their tech support (located in Victoria). They came back with a fix within a couple of hours that worked great (problem turned out to be with how Microsoft suggests you configure Server 2003 on initial load). As I have been so impressed with this software, I have placed an order and look forward to many happy backups without spending hours on the task.

Cheers again

Matt