Cross platform backup?

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ttabbal

Active Member
Mar 10, 2016
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So, I was happily using Crashplan to backup to local machines and have considered setting up a remote machine for really important stuff. That's gone now, so I'm wondering if anyone has a backup setup that can take over? I'm doing some manual stuff right now, but it's annoying time consuming.

LAN based backups between local machines is a priority. I don't want everything to be cloud based, in particular because I'm stuck with data-capped internet with stupidly slow upload speeds.

OSX, Linux, and Windows support.

Ideally, I'd prefer all the clients push to a LAN server when they are running and the server can deal with replication and offsite as needed. Android support would be a bonus, but those are handled decently already.


The server side is easy enough. I have 2 Linux based servers on ZFS. Snapshots are already happening, zfs send/recv can be used for the more critical data. But OSX and Windows can't play here. They could backup to one or both of the servers and the ZFS replication could keep a second copy though.

There's Time Machine, but that only works OSX to OSX, and Windows isn't compatible. Ideally, at least OSX and Windows would use the same client. I have to maintain this, and would prefer not to have many different programs to deal with.

I probably will end up paying for hosting with Amazon Glacier or similar and uploading the more critical data to them. I don't mind this one being independant so long as I can run it on a Linux server to handle the slow upload.

It also needs to be somewhat automated. The biggest failure in any backup system I'm involved with is me. :)
 

Evan

Well-Known Member
Jan 6, 2016
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For OSX you can use ccc to clone the boot disks maybe just to keep local. But for data is an rsync job to your zfs pool and idea, then it will snapshot and send/receive like the others.

Also interested in this thread see if there is anything. Although my only windows are VM’s so I just snapshot then.
 

gregsachs

Active Member
Aug 14, 2018
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I'm another ex-crashplan user;
This is what i did for a mixture of Linux and Windows machines., to backup my critical terabyte of data.
1: Raspberry PI with a USB HDD at my parents house, ~15 minutes away.
2: Minio server running on the PI (OSS S3 clone)
3: Softether VPN Client running on the PI
4: Softether VPN server at my house
5: Duplicati to do backups of the various machines to the Pi, using different schedules.
Negative of how I have it done is that there are 3 different machines running duplicati, each with jobs defined and there is no central place to administer, but there is a script on github, HandyGuySoftware/dupReport that will send a summary e-mail based on the duplicati e-mail reports.
So each duplicati job sends an e-mail to a ubuntu box which just has local e-mail, then dupreport scans that mailbox and sends a summary e-mail to my gmail account.
I also "seeded" the backup first locally on LAN, before moving it to my parents house, to avoid transferring the data initially.
One nice thing about duplicati is that it can backup to a number of different destinations, so you can define the same job twice, once for a local backup and once for remote. Duplicati is a block based backup, so make sure you have a baremetal backup for bootstrapping things. It will backup H-V guests, uses VSS, and generally seems to work well, though I have only tried to restore a couple of files.
 

ttabbal

Active Member
Mar 10, 2016
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Thanks for the suggestion. I'll look into Duplicati as well.

I'm more interested in critical data than disaster recovery bootstrapping though. Generally, I would use a disk failure as an excuse to install fresh. Particularly with Windows, but OSX and Linux get crufty after a while as well. With Crashplan, I would generally backup whatever that platform uses as a home directory tree. "/home" for Linux, "C:\Users" for Windows, etc..
 

gregsachs

Active Member
Aug 14, 2018
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Duplicacy is another option, I went with duplicati for some reason I can't remember.... For critical data it will work just fine.
 

gregsachs

Active Member
Aug 14, 2018
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Are you talking about Duplicacy ?
I looked at both duplicati and duplicacy. I went with 'cati as I found it simpler to setup due to the web interface, while duplicacy was command line only at the time a year ago. All other comments I have made reference duplicati.