We have a small business running out of our home. This business, like so many others, has data as a critical component -- without which, the business would fail.
Because of the importance of the data to the business' survival, thorough and regular backups are critical. I am currently using Bacula, but I'm not terribly happy with it because it is difficult to administer. It took me many hours to get the basic backup jobs set up, and I never was able to figure out how to reliably get the backups copied to RDX cartridges for off-site storage and archival.
So I'm interested in finding another backup solution.
My requirements:
- We don't have much, if any money to spend on this. A $500 outlay would be very hard to come up with.
- The server is a headless Ubuntu installation. The backup jobs run from here. I access this machine via ssh.
- Agents are installed on Windows and Linux machines.
- Some machines are laptops. It should be possible to backup over a VPN.
- Backups are primarily stored on my NAS.
- Copies of the backups are made to RDX cartridges.
- The RDX cartridges are swapped out weekly, taken to the bank & stored in a safe deposit box.
- When a Windows machine is backed up, it creates shadow copies (snapshots) of individual files. This is so that the end user can restore a previous version of a specific file with no intervention from me.
- Incremental backups are run nightly, and full backups are run weekly. Archive jobs are run weekly, seperate from the full backup.
- I shouldn't have to hand-hold the backup.
Can you recommend a backup system suitable for a SMB with little or no money to spend?