Since the Amahi HDA appears as a NAS to you network, it is a natural destination for the backups from your network PCs. All backups are initiated by the client computer on to the HDA.

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

[[Image:VistaBackups3.png | 150px | Vista Backups | right]]

We have documented ways to conduct 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)

There are a number of great open source or free backup programs out there that you can use free (commercial users should check license details). Here is a partial list (feel free to add others):

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The built in backup tool for Windows are very similar. Read the section [[Windows Backups|periodic file backups in Windows Vista to your HDA]]

For XP Backups, visit the section for [[XPBackups | Windows XP]]

How to backup Ubuntu clients using Ubuntu's [[Sbackup | Simple Backup]].

To backup Fedora clients, the following are recommended:

* for backing up your hda shares to usbdrive see [[Rsnapshot]] for an example setup.

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.

Another backup solution is a program called [[SuperDuper!]], follow the link to see the steps and to find out about SuperDuper!.

Backups with [[SystemRescueCD_with_Mac_OS_X | SystemRescueCD]] have been reported that they work, more info can be found by visiting the link.

'''WARNING - Hack ahead!''' For Time Machine smb users only.

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.

For full time machine support in fedora, avahi(bonjour) and netatalk(afp) need to be installed

''Update: Recent versions of timemachine do not appear to respect the max size of the sparsebundle and will cheerfully fill up your disk. To fix this, you need a more recent version of netatalk (2.0.5+?), which has an option to tell fibs about the size of the disk, hence limiting timemachine's space consumption. Fedora 14 has netatalk 2.1.4...''

Bare metal backups are no longer available as a feature in current Amahi releases. Recommend checking out [http://clonezilla.org Clonezilla] as a viable alternative. See the Amahi tutorial on using [[Clonezilla]] for detailed guidance.

'''NOTE:''' Older Amahi releases used the Personal Backup Appliance, or [[PBA | PBA]], with the collaboration of the PBA leader, Roland Hui. PBA is an application to do hard disk clones, backups and restores but appears to no longer be under development.

Symantec's [http://www.symantec.com/business/backup-exec-system-recovery-desktop-edition BESR] allows full system backup and restore (virtual and physical)from any hardware with restore to dissimilar 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.