Best way to back up remote users' files?

July 12, 2007 9:28 AM

Corporate IT Folk: What does your company use to ensure its remote users' files are backed up regularly? Not whole remote sites, but individual users, working in the field or out of their homes?

I work in the IT department of a company with several salespeople around the country (and even outside it). They work individually, not in remote offices, and rely on their laptops for day-to-day work. Unfortunately, many laptop hard drives have died in the last 12 months, and I can't keep calling DriveSavers.

We actually already have remote backup software -- CA BrightStor Arcserve Backup for Laptops and Desktops. It's done everything from causing laptops to stop booting, to bringing our Internet connection to its knees as updates are sent in. We've been trying to find a replacement, but all my research suggests it's the "best in breed" solution. Most of the competition has been eliminated by one of the following deal-breakers:

1. Must not require a VPN connection, or (therefore) mounting a drive in Windows.


2. Must not place arbitrary restrictions on files that can be backed up. (No 255-character limit on file and path names, or ridiculous things like "cannot back up files with an apostrophe in the name". And yes, I've seen that one, IIRC it was Tivoli over WebDAV.)


3. Should send only the parts of files that have changed (deltas), rather than the entire changed file.


4. Must not require user interaction to start or send a backup. (Given the choice, our users will delay indefinitely.)

So, what do you use for your company, and how do you like it? Do you use the ridiculously-abbreviated CABABLD without the problems I'm running into? Or something else entirely?

posted by CrayDrygu to computers & internet (11 comments total)

Loving Mozy and Mozy Pro a lot!
posted by roderashe at 10:20 AM on July 12, 2007

If you can set up cygwin on the Windows machine, you could use rsync pushes from the laptops over SSH. If you wanted to keep multiple versious, you could use rsnapshot on the machine where the backups are stored. This is a more do-it-yourself solution, but all the software involved is free.
posted by oaf at 10:59 AM on July 12, 2007

versions
posted by oaf at 11:00 AM on July 12, 2007

@roderashe: MozyPro looks excellent. I'll have some questions for them, but I'd also like to ask you a couple if you don't mind: Have you had to recover much data from backup? If so, how did the process go? What's your least favorite thing about them?

@oaf: We've thought about that. We're no strangers to open source here (having a public-facing BSD mail server, and a warehouse full of Linux machines), but we've always been wary of the DIY solution. It'd be more complex to set up, more complex to support, and possibly more fragile. But still, perhaps something to consider.
posted by CrayDrygu at 11:14 AM on July 12, 2007

I can vouch for Iron Mountain's Connected Backup PC in the corporate environment. No clue about how much it costs our IT department, though.
posted by enfa at 11:14 AM on July 12, 2007

We use Connected DataProtector
posted by mmascolino at 11:26 AM on July 12, 2007

CrayDrygu,

I have just had to retrieve a few files here and there. I've never had to restore a whole computer (which is not really possible through MozyPro). To restore a computer you'd probably be best off installing the OS, Programs, etc. and then restoring User files from Mozy. That is how I'd do it anyway. We bought this for users who had important contacts, email, spreadsheets, etc.

The process of recovering is that you go through their web interface and use a directory tree to pick the specific files you want to restore and from which backup (I think they go back 30 days). You can backup continuously or at a specific time. The restored files come as a zip file in the proper directory structure they were backed up in.

Maybe some of the above is what I like least. It would be great if MozyPro could backup a whole computer and let you download and image of it to clone onto a new machine. That's just me from an IT standpoint. Our user machines are setup from a common image so the fact that we can't have a MozyPro restore image is really no big deal.

As for Iron Mountain, we use them for our offsite tape storage. I don't remember anything more compelling about their solution that MozyPro - especially when price is a consideration. HTH!
posted by roderashe at 11:57 AM on July 12, 2007

@roderashe: Thanks! We're not concerned about full-machine restores; like you, we're just looking to back up email, spreadsheets, and the like. I'll definitely have to get some more info from them. Even if they don't work out for company use, I might just start using them personally.

@enfa: We use Iron Mountain for offsite tape storage, but their data protection services are just a little too high for our budget. Which is, unfortunately, a little too low.
posted by CrayDrygu at 12:25 PM on July 12, 2007

We use Iron Mountain's Connected (for PC) and Livevault (for servers) here for all our work laptops and most of our servers, but then 'here' _is_ Iron Mountain. (I don't work for either of those groups, however). That is to say, we use our own product, which should say something about our faith in it. The last time I checked, the prices are on the website, and seemed pretty reasonable to me, considering that it's an almost no-effort solution to implement.
posted by Davidicus at 12:28 PM on July 12, 2007

@Davidicus: I'd certainly hope that Iron Mountain uses their own product :) It's something we'll consider if our budget for this becomes less... how to say it nicely... 'frugal'. You're right that the prices aren't unreasonable, they just don't fit into our limited budget at the moment. Even Mozy might or might not squeak in.

I do appreciate hearing that, though. Similarly, part of why I use DriveSavers for data recovery is an interview with their CEO, where he was asked if he backs up his data. He replied, "No, why would I? I own a data recovery company!" Microsoft calls it "dogfooding" (short for "eating your own dog food"), and I'd really expect nothing less.
posted by CrayDrygu at 12:40 PM on July 12, 2007

A bit of user education goes a long way!

so do batch scripts
posted by jannw at 5:45 AM on July 13, 2007