What's a good network-enabled piece of backup software for Windows?

January 19, 2006 10:48 AM

Is there a reasonably priced Windows backup solution that does SCP, not FTP?

LifeHacker's post about automated backup solutions is nice, but mostly inapplicable to me - I keep my home data mirrored across two external drives and am not concerned with running traditional backups. But there's some things at the office I'd like to keep backed up in case they, oh, I dunno... can my ass for asking an AskMe question mid-day rather than working?

So the LifeHacker mention of SyncBase and how it will automatically FTP out the backup inspired me to set it up to automatically backup and send my bookmarks out for a daily backup... till I discovered it doesn't also do SCP.

FTP only? Is it 1992? Not only do I not use a host that supports FTP but I wouldn't USE a host that supported FTP. I could use Tunnelier or the like to do an FTP-to-SCP bridge but then it's not a one-app solution, and the name of the game here is simple. I can do this shit by hand, I just don't want to have to remember to do it.

What Windows software do you know of that's not crap, in the under $50 category and will bundle up and scp a backup?

posted by phearlez to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

I use Unison. It has the built-in capacity to sync over a ssh connection. I don't think there's built in scheduling, but you could easily run it as a Windows Scheduled Task.

It's free.
posted by mr_roboto at 10:53 AM on January 19, 2006

I know nothing about SyncBase, but from their support forums there's this regarding SFTP:

From http://www.2brightsparks.com/help/index.php?pf=kb&page=index_v2&id=156&c=

What is the difference between FTPS and SFTP?

Last Modified: 5 August 2005
Introduction

This article provides information about the differences between FTPS and SFTP.

Article Detail

SyncBackSE supports FTPS, which is standard FTP using a secure SSL connection. SFTP is a different FTP protocol that uses SSH for a secure connection. At this time SyncBackSE does not support SFTP. However, you can use 3rd party programs such as WebDrive which allow you to access SFTP servers as if they were local drives, and so SyncBackSE can then access the SFTP server as if it was a local hard drive.
posted by ShooBoo at 10:58 AM on January 19, 2006

Unison looks nice, but does it offer encryption of the files, not just encrypted transfer via SSH? As mentioned above, Syncback via Tunnelier will work to connect using SFTP, but it is not exactly user friendly. I know this is an old topic, but I think a solid answer still remains to be found. The proper tool should support SFTP, offer file encryption of various security strengths, and offer built in scheduling. I have yet to find such a tool, but maybe someone has.
posted by criticman at 1:46 PM on July 12, 2006