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I'm looking for a way to backup machines running multiple operating systems (possibly with more than one OS on one machine) to a central server on a schedule.

The server is running Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS, and the clients are running Windows XP SP3, Windows XP-64 SP2, and Ubuntu 9.04.

So far I've looked at Clonezilla Server (doesn't work because I have a separate DHCP server), FOG (only for Windows clients), partimage (only a live cd), and rsync (good for files, not for imaging).

I like the idea of Clonezilla Server, which has the clients PXE boot, and then images them to store on the server, but again, the DHCP is a killer for me.

Should I stop looking for one solution and instead have separate backup plans for each OS (DriveImage XML for Windows, tar etc. for Linux)? Or is there a program/solution that will work for what I want to do?

5 Answers 5

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2
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You should be able to disable the clonezilla dhcp server, and add the dhcp options to your existing DHCP server that you need to actually PXE boot.

You can PXE boot a linux with partimage pretty easily, and if you are good with scripts you could automate a backup, but I think this is what clonezilla already does.

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  • +1 - I'll second adding the necessary options to your existing DHCP server. I PXE boot clients from a Windows Server 2003-based DHCP server all the time. Adding the options there was fairly easy, and it's even easier with ISC dhcpd.
    – Evan Anderson
    Jun 5, 2009 at 0:07
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fogproject.org

I've used this extensively and it works great.

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Clonezilla server can handle this.

www.clonezilla.org for all instructions, you will have to setup a DRBL server and configure clonezilla.

Make sure to create some livecds/usbs as i have found not all machines can PXE boot on provided drivers.

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We use backuppc, which can backup using tar, rsync or Windows shares. It has a very good web interface, very configurable and has worked very well for us. I have never used it to back up windows machines though.

It doesn't however deal with reimaging servers in case of a complete failure. We would reinstall the operating system and restore our files from there.

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I think you might be interested to look at bacula.

http://www.bacula.org/en/

This is an open source distributed network backup solution and is very powerful.

Regards, Ovanes

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