What is a simple home backup software which works with a variety of OSes?

Question

Vista came with a backup solution that should work for me, but of course it doesn't. It doesn't play nice with Samba unfortunately.

What are my alternatives? It should be simple, back up on a schedule, and be easily recoverable. I need to back up my Vista, Linux and OSX boxes to a Ubuntu samba server.

Answer 1

I currently rely on the facilities provided by my self built Windows Home Server to back up my PC, but in the past I used Acronis True Image

Answer 2

You should really take a look at CrashPlan. It supports Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can install it on every computer in your house and have them all backup to the same location which can either be one of your computers, an external drive on one of your computers, a network location (SMB), etc. This service is free. You pay if you want to backup to their cloud servers.

I currently use it by having a small Linux box with 4TB of space, running headless with CrashPlan. All my other machines backup to that box.

Answer 3

I use rsync/ssh to backup my laptop to my workstation's raid setup.

I have a script that launches whenever the laptop detects I am on my home network. It will then rsync a delta snapshot of the LVM volumes to the workstation automatically in the background.

One day, I will release the tool as a FOSS project, it is a system daemon that waits for a network condition to initiate the backup.

Answer 4

Syncback Freeware works for me

Answer 5

What do you want to back up too?

There is JungleDisk, Mozy and BackBlaze for windows which will backup to a remote location.

Answer 6

The information that's really important to me is mostly source code for projects I'm working on. I have a home server with mirrored drives running source control so that makes an on site back up of sorts with triple hardware redundancy. Then I wrote a file archiving system that I can run from the command line which connects to the instance running on my AWS server and so I have a scheduled task that zips everything up and sends it off every night.

Off the shelf stuff just doesn't do it right. ;)

Answer 7

I use Rebit, it's the single closest thing to OS X's Time Machine that I've found. I bought the software version, not the software-and-drive version. You plug in an external drive, tell it to use the drive, and then forget about it.

I've used a number of other pieces of backup software in the past and all of them took too much effort to keep your files backed up. Rebit is perfect for that sort of scenario. On the downside, you don't have as much control as other software gives you. Do you want backup software that you install and then forget about? Rebit's your choice. Do you want fine-grained control over how often the backup runs, what time, which files are excluded? Rebit isn't right for you.