Backup software that supports Windows ACLs

[JoeyF]

We have a new backup server at the High School I work with (By new, I mean it's been there for three years and no one ever was bothered to set it up). The server contains three components:

1) Dell Poweredge 2850 with Windows 2003 SP2

2) Dell Powervault 124T LTO-2 Tape Drive attached via SCSI

3) Dell/EMC RAID Array attached via Fiber Optic

We want to get this thing set up, except that we realized that whoever originally ordered it never bought any software for it. So now we're looking for backup software that we can use to back up our two main file servers over the network. One server stores roaming profiles and redirected folders for the students/staff members of the school, and the second stores several network shares used by multimedia and computer courses.

I've looked into a few programs, but since one of these servers stores the profiles/redirected folders for users, we need something that will maintain Windows ACL Permissions (so that User A won't have access to User B's documents in the event of a restore). Only program I found that supported ACL perms was Amanda, but only their enterprise edition supports that.

The only real requirements:

1) Fit the budget of a public school's IT Department (Freeware/open source)

2) Maintains ACLs

3) Can write to tapes

Anyone know of any software like that?

Edit: Forgot to mention, it doesn't really matter if it is Windows or Linux based, nor does it matter to us if we have to install a client on the file servers.

[+BudMan MVC]

And why wont the backup that comes with 2003 server work? You stated the server is running 2003 sp2, it comes with backup software already.

[JoeyF]

We've tried ntbackup.exe for a few weeks, it just does not suit our needs at all. It performs very slowly (to backup one server with about 300Gb of data can take almost a whole weekend). Also, it doesn't work too well with our tape drives (It says it runs out of space after about 80Gb is written to tape, when these tapes have a capacity of 200Gb, and we specifically tell it to "overwrite existing data").

[+BudMan MVC]

And are you trying to backup this 300GB over the wire? What is your network connection? Even a 100Mbit connection could easy take 16 some hours to copy 300GB of data if your only seeing 5MBytes/sec - how many files -- thousands I would assume. Lets say your 100Mbit connection is screaming at sustained 9MBytes per second for the 1,000's of files. Highly unlikely your looking at like 10 hours.

How do you have the backups configured, are you using backup on the server your wanting to backup to write to the remote storage - or pulling the files with the server attached to the tape drive.

The backup software that comes with 2003 is more than capable of backing up your data. As to speed of the backup -- there are many many factors to this.. Which could come into play no matter what software your using. Quite often you can run a agent on the remote server your wanting to backup to speed up this process by indexing what needs to be backed up and then doing a stream to the backup software, etc.

Backup Exec and ArcServe are both common mid level backup software -- they are not FREE though, but maybe there is a academic discount? You might want to look at Yosemite as well the sbs version is only like $399 and supports backing up to 3 servers.

All of these companies have trials -- so you can see which one you like best. You already found prob the best free one out Amanda, as to it not backing up ACLs?? Have no idea what your talking about the FREE client clearly states it supports ACLs

http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Zmanda_Windows_Client

# Backup of open files

# Backs up NTFS filesystem

# Backup of extended attributes (ACLs)

And is supported on windows 2003

Amanda Windows client has been tested with (all running on x86 32bit platforms)

* Windows XP Pro (Server pack 2)

* Windows 2003 server

* Windows Vista

* Windows 2008 server

[Joel]

  Joey H said:

We've tried ntbackup.exe for a few weeks, it just does not suit our needs at all. It performs very slowly (to backup one server with about 300Gb of data can take almost a whole weekend). Also, it doesn't work too well with our tape drives (It says it runs out of space after about 80Gb is written to tape, when these tapes have a capacity of 200Gb, and we specifically tell it to "overwrite existing data").

Are your tapes 200GB capacity UNcompressed or compressed? What kind of tapes and tape drive are you using?

[JoeyF]

  BudMan said:

And are you trying to backup this 300GB over the wire? What is your network connection? Even a 100Mbit connection could easy take 16 some hours to copy 300GB of data if your only seeing 5MBytes/sec - how many files -- thousands I would assume. Lets say your 100Mbit connection is screaming at sustained 9MBytes per second for the 1,000's of files. Highly unlikely your looking at like 10 hours.

How do you have the backups configured, are you using backup on the server your wanting to backup to write to the remote storage - or pulling the files with the server attached to the tape drive.

All three servers in question (the two file servers and the backup server), all have dual 1Gb/s NICs. There is only one hop through the core switch, and the backups are taking place during the weekend, when network traffic is at the lowest.

File Server----(2x 1Gb/s Wired)----Core Switch----(2x 1Gb/s Wired)----Backup Server

The actual backups are pulled by the backup server. Bascially there is a script running on the backup server that loads ntbackup.exe and creates a backup of shares such as \\filesrv01\D$\Redirected\Staff.

  BudMan said:

All of these companies have trials -- so you can see which one you like best. You already found prob the best free one out Amanda, as to it not backing up ACLs?? Have no idea what your talking about the FREE client clearly states it supports ACLs

Well... I feel kinda foolish. I googled "Amanda Windows ACLs", and found several forum posts on Amanda's forums saying "enterprise edition only". Probably should've paid attention to when those posts were made. Thanks man :)

  Joel said:

Are your tapes 200GB capacity UNcompressed or compressed? What kind of tapes and tape drive are you using?

The tapes are LTO-2 tapes supporting 200Gb uncompressed, 400Gb compressed. The drive is an Ultrium LTO-2 drive.

[Joel]

  Joey H said:

The tapes are LTO-2 tapes supporting 200Gb uncompressed, 400Gb compressed. The drive is an Ultrium LTO-2 drive.

You do not want to try getting 300GB on those tapes. At least, not all on 1 tape. I wouldn't trust the state of the backup at more than 10% compressed.

[sc302 Veteran]

If you want a faster backup you are better off backing up to a san then to tape. This way you don't have the slowness of the tape to contend with. I am seeing about 914 MB/min over the line with veritas going to a dell jukebox, I can backup a 249 GB environment in about 4hrs and 29 min doing a full backup, this is without a verify, this is doing a backup of 6 servers, 1 being a sql server and another being an exchange server (total of 8).

Here is my job summary from last Tuesday

Byte count : 249,419,642,113 bytes

Job rate : 913.56 MB/Min (Byte count of all backup sets divided by Elapsed time for all backup sets)

Files : 572,166

Directories : 16,208

Skipped files : 0

Corrupt files : 0

Files in use : 0

Original start time : June 30, 2009 10:00:00 PM

Job started : July 07, 2009 10:00:04 PM

Job ended : July 08, 2009 2:25:46 AM

Elapsed time : 04:25:42

[+BudMan MVC]

2x1 gig does not always mean your going to have that kind of speed.. Are they actually teamed? Does your switch support this? I would be curious to see a bandwidth test between your backup server and the file servers.

Iperf is great for this.. And just do a file copy of say 1 large say 600MB is size, using robocopy how long does it take?

Like I said lots a variables involved.

As SC302 mentions you can get some great speeds. You don't have to do it to the san either.. Using arcserve in my last location using multiplexing of the backups were screaming backups directly to the tapes at well over 1GB/min.. Some were see rates well over 1.5GB/min And there were drastic differences in speed using the agent vs not using the agent.

As mentioned don't always count on the compression to allow 300GB to fit on a 200GB tape -- would set your jobs to use multiple tapes. And compression can lower bandwidth, etc.

I would suggest you look into something like yosemite -- very reasonable price for your setup. There might even be an academic discount off that, etc. But sure grab armada, grab some of the other ones arcserve, backup exec, etc they most always have a free trial for 30 to 60 days and see which one you like best and which one gives you the best performance, etc.

If you get a chance -- please do some testing with iperf, takes no more than a couple of seconds to test.. Very curious what bandwidth your seeing ;)

[Joel]

Get a LTO3 960 and use 400GB tapes.