Other Backup Windows clients to FreeBSD server

Criosphinx

Criosphinx

There was a disaster at a small company where I occasionally work fixing minor problems, mostly on Windows Laptops.

They had a really old server (Windows Server 2003) that was attacked by ransomware, and now they are considering a new server exclusive for backups.

I'm hoping they let me install a small server running FreeBSD and urbackup.

The hardware I'm considering:

First the HP Proliant Microserver G10
https://pcel.com/servidores/servers/Hewlett-Packard-878487-001-173138
Includes a 1tb harddrive where I would install FreeBSD.

For storage I would add a couple of 2TB Seagate drives:
https://pcel.com/hardware/discos-duros/discos-duros-internos/Seagate-ST2000DM006-141338
or maybe NAS Western Digital Red drives, these cost a bit more and I don't know if the give any real benefit for a setup like this.

And finally an external USB 3.0 2TB hard drive like this one:
https://pcel.com/almacenamiento/discos-duros-externos/A-DATA-AHD650-2TU31-CBK-170534
or similar, this would be used to make a copy each week and then taken away to a safe place (or at least a different location)

I'm looking for opinions, would this be a good setup?

Some questions, notes.

The server will host backups for twenty Windows 7/10 clients, only the files in My Documents, Pictures, Desktop, etc not the whole system.
Urbackup-server seems to be easy to use, other options like the amanda-server don't seem to have a good Windows client. But I haven't really tried all of them.
Don't know if I should use ZFS with only two drives and 8GB of ram or if UFS and mirrored drives ar Ok.
Don't know if the external drive is a good idea.

And most important, I have never done something like this before :eek:
I use FreeBSD as my desktop and don't have much experience with servers (just the simple things that I have running locally like samba and postgresql ) never have used things like ZFS.
 
Personally I would lose the 1Tb drive and just use the pair of 2TB drives to form a mirrored ZFS pool. Otherwise if your 1Tb fails with your OS install on it, you risk quite a bit of downtime. A FreeBSD install has a modest footprint. You can use zfs snap/send/receive to incrementally back up selected datasets to a pool on your USB drive, and periodically scrub both.
The only 2 things to watch out for with the G10 is a) booting from larger (3Gb+) drives - there's a BIOS bug that needs a workaround, not sure if HP ever fixed it with a BIOS update; and b) the BIOS doesn't let you choose which of the 4 drive bays to boot from, which means you have to test bootability by physically removing the other drive(s). Neither are showstoppers.

I'll defer to more experienced folks as to what client/server backup solution is most appropriate here. I guess the key questions will be what are your users comfortable with and how much time can you invest in setting it all up, testing etc.
 
It's seems they are talking with a Dell Partner and of course they are offering them Windows Server 2016 :rolleyes:

Nothing against Windows but I'm sure that the license alone will almost double the cost compared to what I was planning.

The 1Tb drive already comes with the HP G10, I will ask if they offer different configurations (strange that only one model at HP site includes the drive but it isn't this)

Thanks vermaden I will read your guide. I still hope they don't go with Windows.
 
I use bacula to backup a mixture of Windows, linux and FreeBSD servers from the LAN and WAN over a 3mb/s link. That goes onto external USB drives, which then copy offsite via iSCSI. There's a windows client for it, you don't need the commercial flavour unless you want support and a GUI.
 
leebrown66 said:
I use bacula to backup a mixture of Windows, linux and FreeBSD servers from the LAN and WAN over a 3mb/s link. That goes onto external USB drives, which then copy offsite via iSCSI. There's a windows client for it, you don't need the commercial flavour unless you want support and a GUI.
Click to expand...
Thats where Bareos comes handy as its Bacula fork most configuration will just work out of the box and you get both Windows clients and GUI (web interface) for free.

As to question why Bareos forked from Bacula you may read more about it here as it took me some time to investigate it:

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/03/19/why-bareos-forked-from-bacula/
 
You might want to look at NAS4Free. It is freebsd based, will network any number of different ways with Windows machines, and is already configured as a storage/backup device.
 
With all the talk about Bareos, I decided to convert from Bacula to Bareos on one of my little backup servers. My Bacula setup is somewhat complex and the tedious part was making configuration changes in the *.d directories for the various parts of the SD and DIR servers.

What I really like is the web interface, which was tricky to setup in my Apache 24 environment. It's worth the effort to have the web-based administration option, even though I usually just run bconsole.
 
bds said:
Personally I would lose the 1Tb drive and just use the pair of 2TB drives to form a mirrored ZFS pool. Otherwise if your 1Tb fails with your OS install on it, you risk quite a bit of downtime. A FreeBSD install has a modest footprint. You can use zfs snap/send/receive to incrementally back up selected datasets to a pool on your USB drive, and periodically scrub both.
SNIP
Click to expand...
This is good advice, but it's likely worth having a hot spare drive as well. 1Tb disks are fairly cheap these days, and if something breaks at an inconvenient time, it doesn't take much time before you've wasted far more money than that. Even if it doesn't break at an inconvenient time, there's that period of time where you're vulnerable to losing everything.

Also, OP should make sure to know how to add and replace disks to the server now before it becomes critical. The last thing you want to do is something dumb, like adding the extra drive to enlarge the pool rather than as a mirror; something zfs makes a little too easy to do.

Not that I've ever added a disk to the end of the other disk rather than the mirror that I wanted.
 
* Grab a generic Intel based tower server (Dell, Fujitsu, HP etc), just make sure it uses Intel's SATA incontroller and not some custom HBA/RAID adapter
* I would highly advice against using Seagate consumer HDDs, grab Toshiba DT01ACA-series, their NAS series or WDs (RED) NAS series instead.
* Setup a ZFS mirror array and use snapshots as rollback (make sure you have enough space).
* Consider use FreeNAS instead as it's going to be a dedicated NAS appliance
* On the clients, make a scheduled script that uses robocopy and transfers to a Samba share
* Done
 
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