Strategies for backing up road warrior's local files???

[Craino]

Greetings,

I am in the process of creating a Business Continuity Plan for our mid-tier business. Business Continuity Plans focus on identifying what is critical to keep the business running in an event of an emergency. They are different that disaster recovery plans in that DRPs tended to solely focus on restoration of IT services.

Anyway, one of our critical resources that we need to develop a strategy for is local PC data on our road warrior's laptops. We don't have a lot of them, but they tend to be our key sales and delivery consultants and the information they store locally is many times critical sales and delivery files that could impact our ability to stay in business in the event of a disaster.

We provide everyone in the company with a network folder for file storage. This data is backed up nightly. The problem is the road warrior's don't want to have to connect to our network remotely just to do their work.

I've played around with both Microsoft Briefcase and Offline File Synchronization. They both are a bit clumsy and I'm not sure either would help address our issue. They seem geared toward keeping the network file as the prime version, whereas I simply interested in making sure the local files are copied/synced to the network folder. If I can get that to happen, then the normal backup process will kick in and we'll have backup copies. We're more than willing to institute a policy requiring remote users to log in to the network at least once a week.

One of the managers I've talked to has suggested that IT just "write a routine" that will compare the local and network folder and transfer over any changes. That's a level of complexity I'd rather not undertake unless I have to.

Has anyone out there come across this issue? Did you come up with a solution that might work for my company?

Thanks in advance for any ideas you might have.

 

[gwichman]

At my previous company we used Tivoli Storage Manager in exactly that capacity and it worked well. The backup client installs as a service and basically we'd set it to periodically poll the backup server to see if it had to do any backups. Thus when it was connected to a network capable of talking to the backup server, it would backup provided it was in it's backup window.

The nice thing is TSM has some features that makes this practical.. First is TSM only does incremental backups. Thus only the files that have changed since the last backup will be backed up (never needs to do a full, except the first time it's run). Secondly, it has a journaling capability that prevents it from having to scan the entire hard drive when it does a backup. The journal keeps track of what files have changed since the last backup. Thus it literally just backs up the files that have changed without even having to scan the file system to determine what files have changed. This all helped reduce the perceived load the laptop user's would experience when the backup was run since it minimized how long the backup would take. Lastly, you can also exclude a lot of directories from backing up at all (say c:\winnt e.g.).

The bad side is TSM is expensive (enterprise level backup solution) and requires REAL TSM experience. You will struggle if you don't genuinely know the product. On the plus side there is good support and superb userbase that can answer questions you have as you go along..

Otherwise i agree with the manager.. Write a perl script or VB program that'll sync things up for you whenever possible. Then sell it to all the other suckers who need it

 

[qzq]

Though I have not used it but you might want to look at suresync, which will give you real time replication of data and they have a scaled down version for workstations. the web site is

http://www.suresync.com

I think.

 

[Craino]

Thanks for the suggestions. However, what I didn't tell you is that we are a medium-sized non-profit and always interested in solutions that work and are free. Simplicity is good too.

I've been using Microsoft Briefcase a couple of months now on my own and actually it looks like a fairly decent solution, at least for a small company.

Any thoughts?

 

[birky]

Hi

I've just been playing around with Veritas Professional which would suit your requirements as it's designed for backing up laptops and desktops.

There's quite a few good features in it such as being able to create disaster recovery cd's for each users system.

You can configure it so that backups can be done remotely (does quick backups as it only backs up the actual changes in a file) so your sales guys don't even need to be in the office and they can do their own restores.

Apparantely the product is not that expensive neither...I'm surprised more people aren't using it.

 

[qzq]

Try Robocopy,it is part of MS resource kit, it is fast and works great.

 

[steveot]

Backup Exec 9.1 for windows has a new laptop/desktop option.

http://www.veritas.com/products/cat...ail.jhtml?productKeywordId=229&productId=bews