I was wondering what strategies others in the community use when backing up their Windows-based workstations to Linux servers. At the moment I'm doing a bit of a test with Ubuntu Server LTS 10.04 and I'm trying to do regular backups from workstations to the server.
My main concerns are that I want to reduce overhead by using incremental backups, and I want to ensure data integrity using some kind of checksum (md5sum if possible).
So far, the best method I've come across is scripting the server to mount workstation shares and take advantage of rsync which I've been told uses MD5 sums. This way I can kill two birds with one stone, as I'm not sure if the same fucntionality is built into Robocopy - another method that has been suggested.
Anyway, I was wondering if anyone out there has a better method that would ensure 100% integrity with the least overhead.
If you want to do 100% integrity backup on windows, you should use software that uses Volume Shadow Copy feature. I'm using Bacula. It's very powerful and flexible open-source backup tool, but notice that it's rather complex and have heavy learning curve.
I love urbackup - totally easy and very clever: http://www.urbackup.org It can do images and file based backup (using VSS).
You should probably implement something like Bacula; it has client daemons for Windows and other OS's and has features expected in a full backup program. You can also look at Amanda and see if that will meet your needs.