Backup solution for Windows?

[no_connection]

I thought this would be a simple thing to solve, but sadly it's not.

The goal is to backup a folder or folders to a NAS. In this case a Qnap.
The backup should happen in the background and be fairly transparent for the user.
Preferably with versioning.
A reliable detection and backup of USB HDD (that could move around) would be a +

I have used cobian backup for other things but it's a little clunky to put on a users machine. It is however my gateway of last resort to use if I can't find a better way.

Syncthing looked somewhat promising but I could not get it to work. Or rather I could not find out what path to enter on the Qnap side. And trail and error only gets you so far. And performance or CPU usage was far from impressive with the files it tried to transfer.

Don't really want a solution that requires you yo use an online account so I didn't try BittorrentSync.

Same with crashplan.

Guess I could use online account if necessary.

It would be nice if the solution was NAS agnostic and mapped simply to a share.

 

[anodos]

For Windows Vista & 7 "Backup and Restore" works pretty well (I do it at work with a few W7 machines). If Windows 8, then use "File History".

 

[no_connection]

Somehow I missed that it could do specific folders set by me. Will check it out. Thanks.

 

[Robert Smith]

Let us forego for a moment that a million of different backup programs already exist; you could schedule a ROBOCOPY on the Windows side, and snapshots on the NAS side. Then you could use “Previous Versions” (right click, Properties, Previous Versions) to access older versions of the changed files at snapshots (I do not know if Qnap allows it, FreeNAS certainly does).

HTH

 

[andrewjs18]

the built-in windows backup & restore solution isn't terrible, though it certainly has its limitations.

right now, I run nightly backups on my windows boxes to an ubuntu backup server over a SAMBA share. works for me, and the data will eventually get migrated to my freenas box once it's built.

 

[no_connection]

I was kind of disappointed when I found out that the files where packed and not ready to be read directly from the backup destination. Understandable but not what I am looking for.
Not to mention that I had to edit the registry to get rid of it.

 

[no_connection]

I was mistaken about BittorrentSync. Seems to do the job of syncing just fine. And compared with the other options it works ridiculously well. User account was only for local auth as well.
Still somewhat limited in options but works for now.

 

[Mlovelace]

I've used Norton Ghost and it works well, but mostly I use a robocopy script that kicks off with task scheduler. Its free and fast, just remember when making the script to exclude the "Temp" and "Temporary Internet Files" directories as well as the pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys

 

[cyberjock]

Care to share the script? I'm interested in trying this just to see how well it does or doesn't work. :P

 

[Mlovelace]

Care to share the script? I'm interested in trying this just to see how well it does or doesn't work. :p

Sure, I don't mind at all.

Code:

Robocopy "<source-path>" "<dest-path>" /copy:DAT /e /zb /xo /fft /r:1 /w:0 /MT:30 /xd "Temp" "Temporary Internet Files" /xf pagefile.sys hiberfil.sys /log+:<computer_tag>.txt 

You change the /copy: DAT flag to /MIR and it will mirror the source. However, with this flag if you delete a file from the source it will remove it from the destination as well when the script is run again. It's useful when you want to migrate data that's in production to a new array.

 

[cyberjock]

OOO. I'll have to try this when I get home just to see how well this works on my desktop. ;)

Thanks!

A guide on using this would be useful for the how-to section too. :D

 

[anodos]

OOO. I'll have to try this when I get home just to see how well this works on my desktop. ;)

Thanks!

A guide on using this would be useful for the how-to section too. :D

I second that motion. Robocopy is one of the most useful Windows tools out there (and it's free, properly maintained, and doesn't install the 'ask toolbar').

 

[Mlovelace]

Also, if you are wanting to back up your OS partition with robocopy you need to use the administrative share as the source (\\<computername>\C$) since robocopy lives in the system32 directory it will fail if the source is "C:\"; I would add the default windows directories to the exclude list as well (windows, programfiles, programfiles(x86))

 

[Mlovelace]

I was finally able to remote into one of the client PCs that has this robocopy script running to get the whole script. I got most of it from memory above, but I thought I'd post the "in production" copy.

Code:

Robocopy "\\<computername>\C$" "\\<storage_target>" /copyall /e /zb /xo /fft /r:1 /w:0 /MT:20 /xj /xd "Temp" "Temporary Internet Files" "Windows" "Program Files" "Program Files (x86)" "Documents and Settings" "Drivers" "hp" "MSOCache" "ProgramData" "Recovery" "System Volume Information" "Config.Msi" "SYSTEM.SAV" "$RECYCLE.BIN" /xf "*.sys" /log:C:\<computername>.txt

The /xj flag is important if you are capturing the OS partition as it excludes windows junction points, you could end up backing up an endless loop of "application data" directories without it. You'll have to show all hidden and windows protected files to determine which 0nes you need to exclude. This script is off a HP client so the hp directory and drivers might not apply.

Enjoy :)