Backups

You have several ways to do backups in your HDA. We break them in two: full disk (bare metal) backups, and periodic backups.

They are all initiated by the client computer on to the server.

Full Disk "Bare Metal" Backups

Each HDA now includes the Personal Backup Appliance, or PBA, with the collaboration of the PBA leader, Roland Hui.

This application is a hard disk clone, backup and restore application.

Using Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 8.5 (Norton save & restore)

Symantec's [1] (BESR) allows full system backup and restore (virtual and physical)from any hardware with restore to dissimaliar hardware. Conversion from P2V or V2P can also be scheduled. Install BESR on all windows computers connected to HDA and route backup to a folder on the HDA. Remember to set permissions on destination folders. Activate VSS copy so any open files are captured, optional threatcon can be used to trigger a backup if a threat becomes widespread. Alternatively BESR can be installed on a central windows machine with agents deployed on all other windows and Linux machines and using the new Linux media server agent (replaces RALUS) backup directly on the Linux HDA. This way you maintain a catalogue of all backups and can trigger them from a central console. BESR is the enterprise windows standard for Backup and restore. Norton the consumer brand of Symantec have "Save & Restore" I'm not overly familiar with this product but it replaces Norton "Ghost" in most markets.[2] the GUI is exactly the same as BESR.

BESR is only for windows machines connected to the HDA but is a great solution to protecting these machines and allows LIVE single pass backup and granular restore of files, saves doing an image and a file backup. Less space less time. An agent is available to backup Linux but another option is to boot the HDA on the recovery disk and create a cold image of the server.

Periodic File Backups

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One of the ways to backup systems in your network is to use the operating-system provided backup service.

We have documented ways to do periodic backups in various platforms. If you have good suggestions on how to do that, please add them to this section of the wiki! (Or email it to us if you're wiki-shy)

Note: To new users only the "Bare Metal" Backups will show in the Amahi Personal Backup webpage all others will not show on this page.

Vista Backups

Here is a quick how to on doing periodic file backups in Windows Vista to your HDA.

Windows XP Backups

For XP Backups, visit the section for Windows XP

Ubuntu Backups

How to backup Ubuntu clients using Ubuntu's Simple Backup.

Fedora Backups

To backup Fedora clients, the following are recommended:

• fwbackups, a desktop utility
• rsnapshot, a solution using rsync, with command line interface

Mac OS X

Mac OS X without Time Machine is not officially supported through automated HDA Backups at this time. You can, however, manually copy files to an HDA shared folder.

Backups with Time Machine

WARNING - Hack ahead! For Time Machine users only.

There is an unsupported way to enable using Mac OS X Time Machine to backup to your HDA. The hack is in this page and it's a one liner command to be typed in a terminal in Mac OS X:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

This will offer you the choice to backup to your HDA shares.

It should be noted that mounting a directory from your HDA via NFS let's you use time machine without this hack.

Needless to say, we're not advocating you backup your data like this, since Apple does not support this functionality. There are rumors that data corruption can occur if the size of the backup exceeds 2TB or if a large number of files, on the order of a million, are backed up. Because the exact conditions leading to data corruption are not well quantified, we do not recommend you backup like this.