[Samba] NT Backups

[Noel Kelly]

Not nearly so much fun, but I just revamped our setup with a Novanet 8.5 for
Linux solution.  $500 gives you a central backup server license and
unlimited client licenses for all your Linux and Windows machines.  Took
about 20 mins to install the server, five windows/linux clients and setup up
the backup regime.

We have actually been using Novanet for a couple of years now, backing up
Novell, Windows and Linux onto the one tape.  Works well.  Occasionally the
tape rotation software has issues but it gets the job done.  We also do a
backup on some assorted webservers on two different leased lines.  The
central Novanet Linux machine sits there with two NICs for each network and
scoops it all onto one tape each night.  Everything bar the Novanet ports
are closed down (couple of high UDP ones - forget off the top of my head) so
it is pretty secure as well.

Noel

-----Original Message-----
From: The Fresh Prince of Darkness [mailto:ghstwrtr at evilgenius.net]
Sent: 15 March 2002 20:59
To: samba at lists.samba.org
Subject: [Samba] NT Backups


Given that rsync, smbclient and smbmount are all kissin' cousins, this 
seems like a good place to post this question.  I'm building a linux 
backup server which will be archiving other linux and some NT servers.

The Linux boxes are being rsynced over ssh, so everything is happy 
there.  The NT servers were initially going to be smbmounted and 
rsynced, but this ended up hanging about 30% of the time on servers with 
large amounts of data.

The next idea was to use smbclient -T and pipe it to tar -x and straight 
into it's proper place.  I was going to use the Windows archive bit to 
ensure that only changed files are brought in every night.  This has the 
problem that deletions are not accounted for and thus the backups would 
swell uncontrolled.

I tried running n rsync daemon (Service) on the NT box, but rsync 
wouldn't run as anyone but user nobody (or whatever the windows 
equivalent is) so this made it impractical for user directories, and 
such.  This was several months back, so I don't know if that's been 
changed since.

I'm now considering writing a perl hack which would do a recursive 
smbclient ls on the share and compare it against the mirror archive. 
This seems like a very cumbersome way to do this.

Another alternative is Cygwin, but in order to maximize portability, I'd 
rather limit the amount of configuration necesary on the client side..

Has anyone had to do something similar with more success than I've had? 
  any pointers would be appreciated.

-Ron


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