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Hello everyone, I have about 5 servers running, 3 of them are Virtual and I was wondering what the best way to back them up was. I was wondering if there are any FREE software out there that could make this very easy. Any suggestions

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You could use Windows Server Backup if you wanted a free solution and push the backups to a USB drive or NAS.

Unitrends, Veeam, and AppAssure are all good contenders. StorageCraft is as well.

I think this is a 15-day trial of Unitrends below and it’s spoken of highly in the community. I’ve used AppAssure and Storagecraft.

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I second Gearhead89 on the Windows Server Backup to a NAS. You’re still up the creek if there’s a problem (fire, tornado, hurricane, thief, etc.) that takes out both the server and the NAS but, barring that, you’d be good. It’s non-free, but I’ve been very pleased with CrashPlan. All of our servers are virtual and the $9.99 per month per host plan has been awesome for us.

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Thank you for the StorageCraft mention, Kyle!

Martin, please let me know if you have any questions about StorageCraft products. You can also check out the online reviews from your fellow Spiceheads on our vendor page, or visit our website and download an evaluation copy of our software while you’re at it.

Cheers!

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Which hypervisors are you using? Our Alike backup solution is designed for Hyper-V and Xen Server. We have three different editions, one of which is free. Our solution provides data deduplication, full VSS protection, disk and memory backup and more. Feel free to PM me with questions for any additional questions.

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Martin,

Here are some questions to get you more recommendations from the peanut gallery:

  • What platforms/applications are you backing up?
  • How much data?
  • Do you have to protect PCs/laptops too?
  • What’s your bandwidth?
  • What’s your RTO/RPO?
  • Are you planning to backup on-premise via software and/or appliance and/or are you willing to consider the cloud?
  • Do you want to/have the resources to manage the process yourself or do you want to outsource to a service provider?
  • Do you have any other compliance and/or retention requirements?
  • Does your school have a disaster recovery plan? Do you need to recover both your systems AND data offsite in the event of disaster or site outage?
  • Do you have an offsite data center for backup and DR purposes? If not are you willing to outsource to a cloud backup and/or DR service provider?

Good luck in your search and DM me if you have any questions.

John

EVault, A Seagate Company

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I would suggest doing some sort of off-site or cloud backup solution. That way if someone pulls the fire alarm in your building and the sprinklers turn on you will still have your businesses critical data. If you don’t have it backed up in a secondary secure site, there is a huge risk to your business of losing that data. It’s hard to quantify financially, but its usually pretty large.

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Hi Martin, you can also look at Steelgate.com, it is an all around backup solution for physical and virtual windows machine. The best way to test is the free trial which you can find here .

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If going free, i would use windows server backup (assuming you are on win 2008 or later). A lot of the commerical products seem to utilize windows VSS anyway.

For paid…

I know veeam is highly regarded for VM’s, but i don’t think it does physical servers?. I could be wrong

I can recommend unitrends, it does physical machines (just about any OS in existence) and VM’s, allowing all the features you would expect from a top end package (dissimilar baremetal, incremental forever, sql backup, file restore etc etc).

The three things i love are

  1. All backups can be seen from a single pane of glass, so you can see any problems straight away

  2. If you change your setup (such as add servers, or add vms and remove physical servers) your still licensed providing your within your capacity limit.

  3. It works, ive had to restore 3 times, a 2003 server, an exchange installation and i recently did a P2V of an ancient sco unix box… all have worked flawlessly.

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@Trev9887 - Yes, Veeam only supports VMware vSphere and Hyper-V VMs