I am interested in providing an online backup facility to my corp intranet. I don't want to trust my user data to online companies that may disappear at any time. What software would I look for? Is there anything available to do this? I am using Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP Pro.
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Rsync is probably your best open source option. It has a few draw backs, specifically with how it handles folder rename/moves, if you don't have too many of these operations, and can manage the bandwidth, it's the ticket.
Jim C. http://www.kleobackup.net
user33974
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For small backup, I would look at just hosting a FTP server and then using an off the shelf / free backup utility that supports ftp which many do.
If you are using Windows, you can even just use the built in backup utility and push it to a network drive or again FTP.
You may want to look at the Microsoft Sync Toy.
For FTP, if you have a spare Windows machine - I recommend Filezilla Server, or for Linux, there are many choices of FTP.
William Hilsum
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There's an open source solution that looks promising. (never used it but I have heard good things) http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/info.html
Chris Nava
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Personally, I'd use rsync as a preference. Setup the outside server with rsync (there by default on Linux, Deltacopy on Windows. You can then install the Deltacopy client onto any Windows machines you wish to backup, and while the first backup will take a long time, subsequent ones will be very quick.
If you aren't happy on Linux, or don't have the option to setup an rsync server; then FTP is probably your best option. I've used Cobian in the past (free, used to be open source) - it supports full/incremental/differential backups, and have options to keep multiple timestamped copies. If thee server is untrusted, it can also encrypt the files for you.
Dentrasi
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You may want to give the Zmanda Online backup system a look. I've been using the purely open source version for years to back up a lot of systems outside of the cloud and it is simple and reliable. I haven't personally used the Zmanda cloud offering but if you are in need of an online system it may be a good fit. I imagine that you can probably download the backups after they are complete so they would be both in the cloud and available on some other medium (again I haven't used it myself but it seems logical since it just uses S3).
carson
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I don't want to trust my user data to online companies that may disappear at any time.
Why not?
You can trust it to a company like Amazon.com, which stands very little chance of disappearing at any time. If you're completely paranoid, you could backup to a second service, as well. The chances of Amazon.com, a second reputable backup service, and your intranet server going kaput at the same time seem very, very slim.
ceejayoz
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rbackup is the best thing I've found so far. The price isn't too steep and it offer most of the features you'd want for this type of service. We have looked into to doing this for our local customers.
Barden
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I'm not sure if this is what you're after, but you might look at LogMeIn Backup. You use their software and mgmt tools, but your storage. I've used in scenarios where multiple locations all have plenty of unused space. Servers at location 1 backup to a server at location 2. Servers at location 2 backup to one at location 3. Servers at location 3 backup to one at location 1...
Not free, but not all that expensive for what you get. I've been pretty happy with it.
CrashPlan or CrashPlan Pro might be worth a look as well. Similar concept as above.
Chris_K
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We use Vembu's StoreGrid to do our in-house backups, as well as provide off-site (to our private servers) for our clients.
It's got all (most?) of the bells and whistles others' do, plus a few extras (like 'grid' storage between clients and such). It's pretty straight-forward to setup and run, and for our purposes it was/is way cheaper then I would have thought it would be. :)
There tech support is top-notch as well.
techie007
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Do you have a solution in place for clients that are inside your corporate network? If so, can that solution be extended using a VPN solution?
Evan M.
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Well online Backup is I guess "Off-Site" Backup in this case so I would suggest that if you want to run your own Backup Servers just run some Linux/BSD/Windows box to host a SFTP/FTPS/WebDAV Server, mount/map it locally on run scheduled Backups to the drive.
Otherwise maybe look into JungleDisk and Amazon S3, since Amazon is unlikely to go away quickly and silently.
Off-Site is never a replacement to a local backup so, because of the by far increased restore time.
Sideshowcoder
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Barden mentioned RBackup, which is what caught my attention. But RBS also has another product called Mercury, which is used for Windows and Mac. Both products can be self-hosted to provied online backup services. both are at http://remote-backup.com