Open Source, Network, Byte Level backup Solution

[The Fox]

Greetings all!
I am currently in search of a backup solution for a 2000+ computer environment. The environment is mainly windows 7 enterprise and some XP machines. We do have a few Macs we would also like to backup (but are not priority). As a precursor to the story- without going into a rant- my system support team underwent some merging/consolidating (cringe) and as a result, our backup solution server was decommissioned and nothing put in its place, nor any budget allocated for its replacement 🙁
In short here’s what I’m looking for:

Requirements:
- Simple interface, the least input to get the backup started the better
- Backup solution that works at byte level to bypass permission restrictions with OS (issue I’ve run into with robocopy).
-Image created should be easily accessible to pull data without loading the image on a computer.
-We don't have a budget for this solution hence the open source need.

What I do have is a share on a network drive I can have the backups reside on. I’ve looked at Clonezilla (no easy image search and file pull), Acronis (too expensive for enterprise), RichCopy and Robocopy both has permission issues since they run in the OS hence need for byte level. I’m looking for best fit solution so please throw out any suggestions you have, I will consider all even priced. I’m sure there are several questions you have about the environment or additional requirements so I will try my best to answer all I can. Thank you all in advance for helping and for reading this request.

Respectfully,

The Fox

 

[popatim]

Being as you are in an enterprise environment, I dont know of any free solutions.

Whats your budget and what OS is the server thats hosting the share?
How many pc's are you looking to license this for?

The usual way its done is everybody keeps there files on the share and that gets backed up with the sever backup. If a users pc goes down you just reimage it from your masters images and relink their user account to their share.

win7 enterprise's built in backup can backup to a network drive btw.

 

[The Fox]

Being as you are in an enterprise environment, I dont know of any free solutions.

Whats your budget and what OS is the server thats hosting the share?
How many pc's are you looking to license this for?

The usual way its done is everybody keeps there files on the share and that gets backed up with the sever backup. If a users pc goes down you just reimage it from your masters images and relink their user account to their share.

win7 enterprise's built in backup can backup to a network drive btw.

Yeah I know being in enterprise, one would expect if a professional grade solution goes away another takes it place, alas sometimes one is handed a wet stick and asked to make fire with it.

Hosted on Server 2012
The exact PC count is hard to track but based on inventory the best I can come up with is around 2000

Each of our depts have their own shares they save files to so this is more of a local computer based backup. We want to backup files that are left with the machine which are some user file info and whatever they leave on the C:\ drive. As for imaging that is how we handle downed machines.

The built in backup is disabled by our automation team so no one uses it because apparently it causes issues with the profile environment they have setup.

 

[popatim]

I checked a few claiming to be open-sourced but actually charge for enterprise use. I will look some more later but If you coe across anything please let us know.

 

[The Fox]

Looks like the solution we're going with is a bit more homemade but seems to be a good solution for what we need. It was another technician that has come up with this process so credit goes to him not myself however I did ask him to share his process so others can take this into consideration if a similar need comes up.


"So in Linux there is a handy command/utility called rsync. Rsync allows you to backup multiple folders/files to external drives, folders, or mounted network shares.

TL;DR - Create a GUI front end to support an rsync back end in order to backup a computer to a network share.

Details:

Rsync isn't very user friendly since we would have to run commands from terminal every time we wanted to back something up. Rsync has a GUI called Grsync. The problem with Grsync is that it only lets you select a single file or single directory at a time.

So here's what I did:
Installed Lubuntu to a 4GB flash drive and then created a GUI that allows you to input as many directories as you want (to backup) simply by clicking on a button and highlighting them. There is another field for the Computer Name and another field for your username to the network share.

When the user clicks 'Backup', it mounts our network share (using mount.cifs) to a folder called /backup/ on the computer. It then creates a folder based on the computer name that was input, and backs up all selected directories to that share.

I should also mention that if you boot the computer from this USB, the actual hard drive will show up as a device under the File Manager. This is how I'm able to backup the hard drive files to the network share."

If anyone reading this has any questions please let me know and I'll help as I can.