Backup cartoon #2

See the above cartoon in which a mother is reading a picture story for her kid in which she reads, 'They saved their files before closing and lived happily ever after.' Even stories have started promoting backups for security & happiness.

Bonkey (The Backup Monkey)

Bonkey (The Backup Monkey) is an open source backup software available for Windows & Mac platform which can backup files only which match a certain criteria to most of the storage devices. Bonkey has specifically been designed to be used in conjunction with Amazon S3, the guys which provide cheap online storage. You can download the code and change it to your custom need if the necessity so arises. Bonkey allows you to:

• backup to multiple locations, including Amazon S3, SFTP, FTP, Windows shares & even local disks
• backup MS-SQL Server databases
• backup automatically at the scheduled time
• email any errors during backup to your email address
• backup only files that have changed, or a snapshot of the files you select
• compress & encrypt files during backup
• transfer files between different locations using drag & drop
• show built-in help

The most important part with Bonkey is that it runs as a Windows service & there's no need to login for it to start, uses less memory and is invisible. The summary screen shows you all you need to know & makes managing your backup groups easier. Bonkey relies on a lot of third party love, all provided free of charge by their respective developers: Bonkey runs on Java; S3 is run by Amazon; Eclipse provides the application framework and icons; Apache supplies a number of libraries and superconnected604 drew the chain-smoking briefcase bearing primate.

Some of the features of the open source backup software are:

• there's a file transfer mode for easier drag & drop transfers
• you can use synchronisation to remove out of date files from backup targets
• it has a built-in restore wizard to restore to a folder or original file locations
  

Backup cartoon #7

"OK, I'll order 5,000 of them just in case our mainframe breaks down."

Backup cartoon #1

There's a 13% probability that your baby will have a 9% chance of growing up to be a bad person.. We're taking you in! The baby's kicking we need backup... NOW! Blair advocates intervening to deal with 'potential offenders'.

Bacula - Open Source Backup

Bacula is an open source network backup solution that is written in C++ and is relatively easy to use while offering many advanced storage management features that make it easy to find and recover lost or damaged files. Bacula is basically an enterprise ready backup software that permits you (or the system administrator) to manage backup, recovery, and verification of computer data across a network of computers of different kinds.

The latest stable release of Bacula is 3.0.2 which supports Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, MacOSX, OpenBSD, HP-UX, Tru64, IRIX, Linux, UNIX and Windows backup clients, and a range of professional backup devices including tape libraries. Administrators and operators can configure the system via a command line console, GUI or web interface; its back-end is a catalog of information stored by MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite.

Bacula supports technologies & networks such as:

• CRAM-MD5
• Cyclic redundancy check
• GZIP
• Large file support
• Logical volume management
• MD5/SHA
• POSIX ACL
• Public key infrastructure
• TCP/IP
• Transport layer security
• Unicode/UTF-8
• Volume snapshot service
  

Backup software

A Backup software is a computer program (which generally sits on the server) used to perform a complete backup of a file, data, database, system, server or clients. The backup software enables a user to make an exact duplicate of everything contained on the original source which most of the times includes compression & encryption. It is also used to perform a recovery of the data, files or system in the event of a disaster. There are several features of backup software that make it more effective in backing up data:

• Volumes
• Data compression
• Remote backup
• Access to open files
• Incremental backups
• Schedules
• Encryption
• Transaction mechanism

BackupPC open source backup system

BackupPC is an open-source, high-performance, enterprise-grade free backup software that can be used for taking up data backup for Linux, UNIX, Solaris, Windows XX and Mac OSX PCs & laptops to a server's disk. BackupPC is highly configurable and easy to install & maintain as it comes with a web-based frontend. The most stable release, BackupPC 3.2.0 beta 0 was released on April 5th, 2009 is published under the GNU General Public License..

The most important thing with BackupPC is that no client is necessary to run it, as the server is itself a client for several protocols that are handled by other services native to the client OS. For instance, BackupPC incorporates a Server Message Block (SMB) client that can be used to back up network shares of computers running Windows. Paradoxically, under such a setup the BackupPC server can be located behind a NAT'd firewall while the Windows machine operates over a public IP address. While this may not be advisable for SMB traffic, it is more useful for web servers running SSH with GNU tar and rsync available, as it allows the BackupPC server to be stored in a subnet separate from the web server's DMZ.

Backup & Recovery: Inexpensive Backup Solutions for Open Systems by W. Curtis Preston

Backup & Recovery: Inexpensive Backup Solutions for Open Systems by W. Curtis Preston is an answer to expensive & propreitary data backup solutions as it features data backup with open system. Within the circuits of the IT industry the book is regarded to help you in taking a Champagne Backup on a Beer Budget and helps you to decide why to backup, what to backup, when to backup, how to backup and storing, monitoring, testing & retrieving your backups.

The book features free & open source backup systems such as Amanda, BackupPC, Bacula & Open Source Near CDP and backing up of databases & files. Not only this if you are really looking for a commercial backup utility, the book helps you shortlist some and find the best one for your business with tips on 'what to look for' in them.

Selection, extraction & backup of metadata from a PC

As we all all know that not every information of a Personal Computer is stored in data files, like some information gets stored in the CMOS, etc. So, the complete recovery of a system from its scratch requires the selection, extraction & backup of these as well:

• System description
  A system description, or specifications, is needed to procure an exact replacement after a disaster.
• Boot sector
  The boot sector can sometimes be recreated more easily than saving it. Still, it usually isn't a normal file and the system won't boot without it.
• Partition layout
  The layout of the original disk, as well as partition labels, tables & filesystem settings, is needed to properly recreate the original system.
• File metadata
  Each file's permissions, owner, group, ACLs and any other metadata need to be backed up for a restore to properly recreate the original environment.
• System metadata
  Different operating systems have different ways of storing configuration information. Windows keeps a registry of system information that is more difficult to restore than a typical file, so a backup of the complete registry should also be kept so that it can be restored in case of a disaster.
  

Areca Backup

Areca Backup is an Open Source backup solution designed for personal use on Linux & Windows machines. Developed in the Java programming language, Areca Backup is available under the General Public License (GPL) v2 and allows its users to select a set of files, & folders, to be backed up. You can specify backup location and configure post-backup actions (like sending backup reports by email or launching custom shell scripts) after taking backup in ZIP/ZIP64 compression or AES 128 & AES 256 encryption which are readable by WinZip or other archivers.

Areca supports full, incremental & differential backups and uses the file's size & last modification time to detect modified files. If one of these attributes is modified (whatever its value is), the file is flagged as modified. This allows a fast detection of modified files.

The most important features of Areca Backup:

• Simple to set up
  The configuration of Areca Backup is stored in an XML file which can be edited with Areca's graphical user interface.
• Versatile
  Areca Backup can use advanced backup modes (like delta backup) or simply produce a basic copy of your source files as a standard directory or zip archive.
• Interaction
  Track different versions of a specific file, browse your archives, recover or view specific files, merge a set of archives... and much more.
  

Back up terminologies #4

• Remote store
  Backing up data to an offsite permanent backup facility, either directly from the live data source or else from an intermediate near store device.
• Restore time
  The amount of time required to bring a desired data set back from the backup media.
• Retention time
  The amount of time in which a given set of data will remain available for restore. Some backup products rely on daily copies of data and measure retention in terms of days. Others retain a number of copies of data changes regardless of the amount of time.
• Site-to-site backup
  Backup, over the internet, to an offsite location under the user's control. Similar to remote backup except that the owner of the data maintains control of the storage location.
• Synthetic backup
  A term used by NetBackup for a restorable backup image that is synthesized on the backup server from a previous full backup and all the incremental backups since then. It is equivalent to what a full backup would be if it were taken at the time of the last incremental backup.
• Tape library
  A storage device which contains tape drives, slots to hold tape cartridges, a barcode reader to identify tape cartridges and an automated method for physically moving tapes within the device. These devices can store immense amounts of data.
• True image restore
  A term used by NetBackup and Backup Exec for the collection of file deletion and file movement records so that an accurate restore can be performed. For instance, consider a system that has a directory with 5 documents in it on Friday. On Saturday, the system gets a full backup that includes those 5 documents. On Monday, the owner of those documents deletes 2 of them and updates 1 of the 3 remaining. That updated document gets backed up as part of The Monday night incremental backup. On Tuesday afternoon the system crashes. If we perform a normal restore of the full backup from Saturday and the incremental backup from Monday to the fresh system, we will have restored the 2 documents that were intentionally deleted. True image restore keeps track of the deletions with each incremental backup and prevents the deleted files from being inappropriately restored.
• Trusted paper key
  A machine-readable print of a cryptographic key.
• Virtual Tape Library (VTL)
  A storage device that appears to be a tape library to backup software, but actually stores data by some other means. A VTL can be configured as a temporary storage location before data is actually sent to real tapes or it can be the final storage location itself.
  

Amanda

AMANDA, aka Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, is basically an Open Source archiving tool or data backup system which allows the administrators to set up a single master backup server to backup data from multiple hosts over the network to backup mediums using a client-server model which includes atleast:

• the backup server & client itself
• a tape server
• an index server

All these servers may not necessarily reside on the same machine. With Amanda, one can backup data residing on multiple computers on a network. AMANDA uses native dump and/or GNU tar facilities & can back up a large number of workstations running multiple versions of Unix. Amanda uses Samba, Cygwin or a native Windows client to back up Microsoft Windows desktops and servers as well.

AMANDA started as a university project for the University of Maryland which was later released under a BSD style of a license and is now available both as an open source community edition & a fully supported enterprise edition. It runs almost on any Unix or Linux based systems and may also be combined with a native Win32 client that comes with support for open files.

Amanda supports both tape & disk-based backups and provides some useful functionality not available in other backup products like tape-spanning, ie, if a backup set does not fit in one tape, it will be split into multiple tapes. Among its key features is an intelligent scheduler which optimizes use of computing resources across backup runs.

Back up terminologies #3

• Flash Backup
  A term used for raw partition backup used by NetBackup Advanced Client. In NBAC, support is limited to the VxFS (Veritas), ufs (Solaris), Online JFS (HP-UX) and NTFS (Windows) filesystem types. Similar to the UNIX utility dump.
• Full backup
  A backup of all (selected) files on the system. In contrast to a drive image, this does not include the file allocation tables, partition structure and boot sectors.
• Hot backup
  A backup of a database that is still running and so changes may be made to the data while it is being backed up. Some database engines keep a record of all entries changed, including the complete new value. This can be used to resolve changes made during the backup.
• Incremental backup
  A backup that only contains the files that have changed since the most recent backup (either full or incremental). The advantage of this is quicker backup times, as only changed files need to be saved. The disadvantage is longer recovery times, as the latest full backup, and all incremental backups up to the date of data loss need to be restored.
• Media spanning
  Sometimes a backup job is larger than a single destination storage medium. In this case, the job must be broken up into fragments that can be distributed across multiple storage media.
• Multiplexing
  The practice of combining multiple backup data streams into a single stream that can be written to a single storage device. For example, backing up 4 PCs to a single tape drive at once.
• Multistreaming
  The practice of creating multiple backup data streams from a single system to multiple storage devices. For example, backing up a single database to 4 tape drives at once.
• Normal backup
  Full backup used by Windows Server 2003.
• Near store
  Provisionally backing up data to a local staging backup device, possibly for later archival backup to a remote store device.
• Open file backup
  The ability to back up a file while it is in use by another application. See File locking.
  

Findings of a global backup survey

A global backup survey, organized by Kabooza, about backup habits, risk factors, worries & data loss of home PCs came out with the following findings. The Kabooza survey was done on 4257 respondents from around 129 countries.

• 82% of home PC users don’t do regular backup.
• 66% have lost pictures & files on their home PC. 42% within 2008.
• 71% are most worried about losing their digital pictures on their home PC.
• 54% of the respondents do not have any backup what so ever for their PC.
• 54% of the respondents see virus as the primary risk factor for their personal data.
  

People neglect their home PC backup needs. Over 82% of the respondents don’t do regular backups. At the same time 66% have had critical data loss. This is alarming and surprising since the risk of losing important pictures or files, due to virus, hard drive crashes, physical damage or theft, is so high.

Proprietary backup softwares

Find below a list of Proprietary backup softwares available today to take backups:

• .Mac Backup
• ARCserve Backup from CA Inc
• Acronis True Image
• Aggregate Backup And Recovery System
• Altexa online Backup Altexa by 77Backup
• Atempo TIMEnavigator
• Backup4all
• BackupAssist - Cortex IT Labs
• Backup Dwarf - by KRKsoft
• BakBone NetVault
• Carbonite
• CDP Server - Near Continuous Backup software for Windows & Linux
• CommVault Systems Simpana
• CrashPlan (automatic backup) Code42
• Disco
• Dmailer - Dmailer Backup
• EMC Networker
• EMC Corporation Retrospect
• Geek Squad Yearly Subscription 128-bit encryption
• Genie Backup Manager
• Get Backup - For Mac OS X
• GRBackPro Professional backup software - For Windows Server
• Handy Backup
• HP Data Protector
• Hyperbac
• i-drive
• Infinit
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM)
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack (TSM FastBack)
• IBM Aggregate Backup And Recovery System
• InMage DR-Scout
• Image for Windows - Drive imaging
• Keepit
• Langmeier Backup
  
• Macrium Reflect
• Microsoft Data Protection Manager
• Nero BackItUp
• NTI Backup Now
• Paragon Drive Backup
• PowerFolder
• Roxio Toast
• SonicWALL SonicWALL CDP
• SOS Backup Integrated Online & Local Backup
• Steek
• Symantec Backup Exec
• Symantec NetBackup
• Symantec Norton 360
• Symantec Norton Ghost
• Syncsort Backup Express
• Time Machine - Included with Mac OS X v10.5 "Leopard"
• UltraBac Software - UltraBac and UBDR (UltraBac Disaster Recovery)
• UltraBac Software - UltraBac and UBDR Gold (UltraBac Disaster Recovery)
• Unitrends - Data Protection Unit
  
• Uranium Backup - Windows backup software with Tape support
• Ventis BackupSuite 2008 - Windows backup software.
• Windows Home Server
• Windows Live OneCare
• Windows Recovery Environment - Microsoft's tool that is part of Windows Vista
• Yosemite Server Backup - Barracuda Networks Inc
  

Notable incidents of not taking backups

There a few instances available where panic was created due to not taking timely backups. Three of such incidents are pointed below:

• In 1996, during a fire at the headquarters of Credit Lyonnais, a major bank in Paris, system administrators ran into the burning building to rescue backup tapes because they didn't have offsite copies. Crucial bank archives and computer data were lost.
• Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has documented [18] 16 instances of stolen or lost backup tapes (among major organizations) in 2005 & 2006. Affected organizations included Bank of America, Ameritrade, Citigroup, and Time Warner.
• On 3 January 2008, an email server crashed at TeliaSonera, a major Nordic telecom company and internet service provider. It was subsequently discovered that the last serviceable backup set was from 15 December 2007. Three hundred thousand customer email accounts were affected.
  

Back up terminologies #2

• Copy backup
  Backs up the selected files, but does not mark the files as backed up (reset the archive bit). This is found in the backup with Windows 2003.
• Cumulative incremental backup
  A differential backup used by NetBackup.
• Daily backup
  Incremental backup used by Windows Server 2003.
• Data salvage
  The process of recovering data from storage devices when the normal operational methods are impossible. This process is typically performed by specialists in controlled environments with special tools. For example, a crashed hard disk may still have data on it even though it doesn't work properly. A data salvage specialist might be able to recover much of the original data by opening it up in a clean room and tinkering with the internal parts.
• Differential backup
  A cumulative backup of all changes made since the last full backup. The advantage to this is the quicker recovery time, requiring only a full backup and the latest differential backup to restore the system. The disadvantage is that for each day elapsed since the last full backup, more data needs to be backed up, especially if a majority of the data has been changed.
• Differential incremental backup
  An incremental backup used by NetBackup.
• Disaster recovery
  The process of recovering after a business disaster and restoring or recreating data. One of the main purposes of creating backups is to facilitate a successful disaster recovery. For maximum effectiveness, this process should be planned in advance and audited.
• Disk image
  A method of backing up a whole disk or filesystem in a single image. Since the underlying data structures are what is actually backed up, this method does not allow for file level control over what is selected for backup or restore.
  

Why choose BackupDataOffsite.com?

The systems installed at BackupDataOffsite.com are automatic, secure & provide offsite data protection for your invaluable data. You can prevent costly data loss & downtime with the easy to use & reliable online data backup solution available with them. You can get started with the Free 30 Day Trial which is fast & easy and takes less than 15 minutes to setup.

The advantages of offsite data backups:

• Cost effective, secure and automated offsite backups
• Unlimited backup storage capacity at affordable, scalable rates
• Back up multiple computers to one account
• Schedule automated backups to run daily or even hourly
• Top-level security, performance and monitoring
• Easy to use software
  

How the system at BackupDataOffsite.com works

• Install a small agent program on your computer or server
• Select files to back up, and a backup schedule
• Your files are encrypted and compressed, then sent to our data center
• Subsequent backups send only incremental changes, reducing bandwidth & backup times
• Receive email notification after every backup, or only when warnings or errors occur
  

Open source backup softwares

It's not that you will only find paid softwares for taking backup for your files. You can rely upon the following open source backup softwares for taking backups:

• AMANDA
• Areca Backup
• BackupPC
• Bacula
• Cobian Backup 8
• cpio
• DirSync Pro
• DAR
• dump
• duplicity
• FlyBack
• Mondo
• rsync
• tar
• TimeVault
• Venti
• Zmanda Recovery Manager