Question : Problem: Recommendations for electronic backup software?

We are looking to do electronic based backups across our WAN and I need recommendations on software.  We do not want to outsouce.  The goal is to duplicate the benefits of our tape based backup solution and enhance upon it.

Here are the details -
1.  We are a windows shop.
2.  Remote office has a 1MB Internet connection.
3.  We need to keep file history, meaning, we cannot just copy the latest version of a file to the alternate location.  We need the ability to restore a few versions back.  Just like with tape, we don't just have last nights tape, we have every night for the past week, then monthends for the past 6 months.  So, if a user screws up a file on Tuesday, but doesn't realize it until Friday, we can still restore Monday's version.
4.  Ideally I would like a disk/block based backup solution so if a user changes a 500Meg file by adding a comma, the whole file doesn't have to be transmitted over the WAN again.  Just what has changed.  Some of the online providers offer this technology.

Thanks.  Let me know if you need more info.

-r

Answer : Problem: Recommendations for electronic backup software?

OK, I've posted this answer before, but here it goes:

We protect 2 Terabytes per night from 200 remote servers with a backup strategy using RSYNC.  These include both Windows and Netware servers.  Our centralized backup file server runs OpenSuse 10 and has a combination of both RAID SCSI and USB External drives attached.  

RSYNC has done what no commercial software seemed to be able to do: give us a good working backup system for our enterprise.  It uses very efficient synchronization and compression algorithms to move the changes from our distributed servers.  Then, each day, we back up the Linux box using a Windows server with a tape jukebox attached and running CA ArcServe.  That way we get a daily snapshot to tape allowing us to do a scheduled rotation.

Your project is the same, you have data to backup, and your remote connection is slow for the job.  RSYNC is perfect because it only backs up the changed parts of files.  You can run the RSYNC server portion on a Windows XP machine.   And for the tape part of this, you can use the NTBackup on the same machine writing to a connected tape drive.  We only went 'massive scale' due to our gimungous total data set size.

Here's a link to the RSYNC Project:

http://rsync.samba.org/

Here's the Novell RSYNC forum:

http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/newsportal/thread.php?group_id=1148&group=novell.forge.rsync.help

And here's a good resource for RSYNC on Windows:

http://art.wilderness.org.au/software/help_cygwin-rsync.shtml

Here are two more good RSYNC Windows links:

http://www.itefix.no/phpws/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=6&MMN_position=23:23

http://www.nasbackup.com/

The NASBackup Project is a neat Open Source effort to make a gui-based RSYNC client for Windows.  It works very well.

Good Luck on your project.  It's a miracle what this utility can do!

Travis