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I have a specific, if somewhat unusual, backup requirement:

I need to backup several Windows directories that reside on a single hard drive, and have the requirement to be able to roll back any one of the Windows directories to any one of the previous 14 days state.

There is not enough hard disk space to store 14 full backups for each directory.

I cannot use online backup solutions.

There is enough hard disk space on the volume to backup up to two full backups per Windows directory, and then the remaining backups as incremental (ideally) or otherwise differential types.

I need to be able to download the backup files using FTP, so think I would need 14 files per Windows directory, and that would be a combination of up to two full backups, with the remaining number of incremental or differential backups.

Ideally, these backup files would not be a proprietary file format. E.g. they could be zip files, or even just directories containing the full and incremental files.

The software needs to run on Windows 2008 R2 Server.

Is there any backup software with which I could solve the above? If not, does anyone have any ideas how I could meet the above requirement?

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  • Just a thought, have you considered having all the folders as part of a git repository? That way it should be possible to tag everything whenever you want in a given state. You could also have a ordinary backup to double up data. Another option is to look into file systems supporting snapshots.
    – holroy
    Oct 4, 2015 at 21:58
  • What directory sizes are we talking about? I'm asking because I think buying an extra disk is gonna be much easier than what you are trying to setup (and maintain!) now.
    – user416
    Oct 21, 2015 at 7:18

3 Answers 3

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Check SEP Sesam.

It allows to organise a decent infratructure within an enterprise as well as - just on one machine.

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I like and always recommend Cobian Backup. I think it support all your requirements. The relevant features for this questions are:

  • It allows to select one or many destination for each backup set.
  • Support for full, differential and incremental backups, with the option to select the full backup frequency.
  • Can backup from/to FTP or FTPS servers (not SFTP, though, if that matters).
  • Output format can be a plain copy of everything (similar to raw copy/paste), or standard zip or 7zip files, with optional compression and encryption.
  • Does support Windows 2008R2 and most other recent and not-so-recent Windows versions
  • Free (formerly open source, repository still available)

On the bad side, it's has been a long while since its last update, and its future is uncertain as it has been recently been sold to a new owner (but no noticeable change otherwise). The current version do work as it should and is still available.

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I suggest that you check out CloudBerry Backup to automate Windows Server backup to Amazon S3 , Glacier, Google Cloud Storage , MS Azure and 20 more cloud storage providers.
But what is more important for you is that it can back up to local destinations as well. on the Retention Policy step (former Purge Options) of the backup wizard you can specify how many version to keep so that you can restore to a point in the past. Check out a link below for more details. http://www.cloudberrylab.com/blog/cloudberry-backup-purging-options-explained/

you can use our simple mode to have the files not in the proprietary format

It comes with the following features:

  1. Scheduling and Real-Time Cloud Backup
  2. Comes with one time fee and no recurring charges.
  3. No proprietary data format and you can access your data using other Amazon s3 tools.
  4. Supports all Amazon S3 regions and Reduced Redundancy Storage.
  5. Amazon Glacier support
  6. Encryption & Compression
  7. Local Backup
  8. Incremental and Block Level Backup
  9. Network Locations Backup

15 day free trial is available http://www.cloudberrylab.com/server

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  • You have provided many similar answers on a couple of questions. I appreciate the suggestion but I want to point out that you have to disclose your affiliation. I have edited two of your answers to add such a disclaimer. You should do this for the rest of your answers (like this one) yourself. Otherwise the answers will get flagged as spam and deleted sooner or later. Also, please try to make descriptive links, i.e. put text on the links. I also did this for the other 2 answers; it goes like [text](link) Feb 11, 2016 at 20:19

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