Small Business Backup Software

[Murgos]

I still say 8mm tape.

I bet you could do a fairly robust, if costly, back-up onto vinyl.  The reader would be super easy to make, the presser might take a bit of thought to do cheaply/quickly.  Maybe convert some kind of brail printer?

[Venkman]

I, too, have subscribed to this newsletter and am going to investigate this Mozy and Backblaze of which you speak.  I'm still sad about those Morrowind save files.

You can also get a dropbox, although I believe its much more expensive. I think 150$/year for 200gb? But then you also get all the functions of Dropbox.

Does Dropbox sync to online servers? Their site says other computers in the home. I'd prefer to have something offsite because I'm not going to be able to have a consistent policy of backing up to tape and driving it to a safety deposit box

[caladein]

Your files are both on the computers you have Dropbox running on and offsite via Amazon S3 (and web accessible via their site).  You can also set up symbolic links to get things sync'd outside of the Dropbox folder.

It's pretty awesome.

[Ookii]

I wouldn't use DropBox for real backups though, that is what Mozy/Carbonite/BackBlaze are for.

[caladein]

I found Carbonite to be incredibly clunky compared to Dropbox.  Maybe Dropbox just spoiled me with its interface and web site.

Are Mozy or BackBlaze any better in that regard?  (I probably still have a Carbonite trial since I complained about it when I uninstalled so if it's actually not-clunky I could give it another shot.)

[Ookii]

Well I actually did Carbonite without checking any of the others out, after reading BackBlaze's blog I would of gone with them if I knew about them at the time..

Dropbox and Carbonite serve two different purposes, Dropbox is for syncing files among different computers or having files accessible wherever you go, and it's also neat that you can share your files publicly.  Carbonite on the other hand is a dump for your files, you specify which ones go in and they upload and stay there.  If you ever need to restore them you pick the files and it downloads them for you and puts them back in the right place.  I also don't remember Dropbox having any sort of built in backup facility, with Carbonite you right click on this folder and say "Back this up".

I imagine Mozy and BackBlaze are the same, they're all for backing up and keeping the files as opposed to sharing or syncing the files.

[Morfiend]

So, these are the 3 I am considering getting for my guy.

Genie Timeline Backup
http://www.genie-soft.com/

Acronis True Image Home 2010
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

Norton Ghost

I know I know, Norton. But its gotten some decent reviews.

[Ingmar]

Ghost isn't really what you want. Its for doing images, as in create a giant image of *everything*, unless they've added some Backup Exec lite type features to it since last I used it. Its going to be overkill and probably very clunky for a backup that really just wants to capture data.

I don't have any direct experience with the other two.

[Venkman]

Necro'ing for a followup question.

I use SyncToy to backup across my home network. Works perfectly. What I'd really like to have though is a SyncToy that would let me sync with my webserver. All I really need to backup is save game files. Right now I sync all of them to desktop folder, ZIP each by game, and copy it to my web space. It's not time consuming really, so this is more me being curious. I've looked at some of the others mentioned here, but I don't feel like I need to pay for the web space when I'm already paying for one.

I tried mapping my web space to a drive letter, but XP won't let me do that. And I can't get SyncToy to recognize my webspace as a valid folder with which to sync.

[Salamok]

Windows task scheduler+curl?

Edit: actually you probably don't need curl. 

[Venkman]

Huh, never heard of cURL. Looks pretty interesting. May try that. Thanks.

[Salamok]

Huh, never heard of cURL. Looks pretty interesting. May try that. Thanks.

Overkill, you don't need it for what you want:

Task Scehduler
command line ftp in windows

or instead of using batch files you could load php on your windows box and run php scripts: php.exe -f upload_my_stuff.php

edit: curl does come in handy if you want to grab web pages, upload through a proxy, or do anything tricky that involves automating web things.  So by all means feel free to get your feet wet with that.

edit2: and oh yeah curl supports sftp so you may want to use it after all.

[Lantyssa]

Is the web server internal?  I don't like using FTP unless it is, and still prefer SSH or SCP.

[Ookii]

As much as I hate Lifehacker if you search for software on their site you generally find something great and free.

Research is your friend!

[caladein]

Is the web server internal?  I don't like using FTP unless it is, and still prefer SSH or SCP.

All you'd need to do for that is use WinSCP (or your favorite SFTP-capable FTP client) instead of the Windows one.