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Remote backups

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by l.morris

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I have several clients who need backups done remotely. Right now, we use PC Anywhere for remote support issues, but haven't found a backup systems that compliments that. Because when you are remoteing into a computer, the host computer doesn't really "see" the remote computer as a network, it' hard to run something like ghost. And ghost won't backup onto the hard drive it's writing.

Doing a straight file transfer isn't an option as it would take too much time.

Any suggestions?

7 replies

by charley

you don't specify what software package you use for you corporate backups. However, I've had experience with ARCserv and BackupExec. Both of these have client software which you can load on a Win9x machine. This enables the server running the backup operation to have remote access to the workstation for archival purposes. The next question is what kind of a connection do you have between your backup server and your remote users? If they are on a dialup connection, then you could just set up a scheduled task for the remote workstations to dial into your network at a specified time. That time should be a few minutes before the server is ready to query that workstation for files to be archived. If the remote users have a broadband connection, you can simply make use of that by setting up a VPN connection. Then the server would be able to see the remote machine in the local environment.

by charley

My point is that since you are using some kind of backup system on YOUR server, AND you are letting them have space on your server, why not have them buy the client side of your backup software. Let your server do the backups in the background.

by l.morris

This has to be a simple answer. There is no corporate server involved. These are small businesses of usually 1-2 computers that will be get backed up. We prefer that we can initiate the process as our clients aren't usually reliable (or they'd be doing their own back-ups). They are willing to leave PC Anywhere on for us to access them, but that's about all they can remember.

What I need is a program that will backup their hard drive on the fly, and then I can transfer the backup o our server.

by walterzalewski

Check out www.dantz.com. Its a fairly simple yet flexible and powerful backup software, and relatively inexpensive. You can backup the system to a file (with different levels of compression), and then just use PCAnywhere to download the file from the client machines. The program itself is only a few megs, so uploading it onto client machines would not be a problem. Hope that helps, good luck. Oh BTW, it does backups over the network relatively quickly as well.

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