Thanks for the thoughts!
<< I just don't know that Bacula will quite fit here, because we have
travelers on a regular basis overseas, it's not uncommon for some of
them to not be in the office for a week or two, back in for a day or
part of a day, and then back out again. But it's entirely possible
that a set of jobs set up in Bacula with the right retry parameters
would be at least as effective as BackupPC for these cases, so I'm not
dismissing it. I think that the big reason I'm leaning that way is
because of the user interface for restores more than anything. >>
Steve,
I know the feeling about having off-site clients not 'plugged' into the
network. We are not quite as bad as your company, as our clients are not
oversea's. Our clients are in remote sites for a week or so at a time, and
jack into the network maybe once every two weeks (It's a royal pain in the
butt to get window's updates pushed to clients that never connect). For
those users we have actually set up external USB disks (there are so many
different brands out there, but the traveldrives work great) on their
machines. They have to be reminded (which is a pain in the butt sometimes)
to manually back up their data (backup script on their desktop) to the drive
every so often. It's not the most ideal situation, but it works with the
clients that rarely come in but can't afford to lose their data.
I believe Maxtor also has the 'one touch' portable backup drives. You just
install the software and it's as simple as reminding the users to plug in
the USB drive, and push a button. I keep saying 'reminding' because they
really don't pay attention to manually doing a backup until they have lost a
hard-drive. But after that, they seem to do great in preaching how
important backups are!
I know it's not the most ideal solution, but there are times where a
centralized backup solution does great, and times where it's just not the
best. We actually evaluated the options available to us with remote clients
that don't connect, and came to a-few negative thoughts to this (not just
bacula, but 6 other backup solutions).
*Bandwidth - If they are in a hotel, on a hotel wifi attempting to do a full
10gb backup over the network via vpn to the servers..that will take forever
*Accessibility - Just how often are they actually 'online'. Some of our
clients get online to get email on their laptop then log off, not enough
time to actually get a backup done
*'Phone Home' - How often do they actually connect to the work network, and
how long do they connect for.
Anyway, I ramble on and on. Im actually trying out those options I gave you
in an earlier email; for the next 2 weeks on 15 machines on separate
department pools. So I should have a better understanding on just how
effective those options are with remote laptops :-)
~Jayson
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