Backup data + system to Windows Share

[RussD]

Hi Folks,
I am struggling to find info on how to backup both the system and the data from my Red Hat Server to a share on a windows SBS server where the regular network backup will take it off-site every night.

The Red Hat Server is basically a web server on the LAN using RAID 1 to ensure some redundancy in the discs and is used as an internal web server for an administration system.

The Windows SBS server is the domain controller and rest of the network is totally windows based. The SBS server has large discs which host all of the general data to be backed up and is controlled by a 3rd party IT company.

We have a share created on the SBS Server which is to backup all of the information from the Red Hat box to ensure we can potentially restore the system quickly in case of a major problem.

The thorn here is that I am working on a different site to the Red Hat Box and have to do everything over SSH.

Has anyone got any ideas on what I could implement to achieve this? the Red Hat server has Samba running but I have not used it to mount an external windows share?
Is there an 'out of the box' backup software on the Red Hat server that I can control over ssh to do the job?
The biggest worry for me is the backing up the system to a state where it can be popped on a disc and the system restored from the backup - or most of it anyway - enough to get the server back on its legs.

Has anyone got any ideas on how to achieve this? I am a bit out of my depth here?

Thanks guys.

[Irithori]

some thoughts:

If the redhat box is just a webserver (as opposed to a customized, hand-crafted, multiple daemons installation, salted with some selfcompiled programs), then you probably dont need a full system backup.
Web-datafiles and some config files (network, apache, php,..) together with a fresh installation
should then be enough.

If you do want to make system backups:
You basically need all files, their permission and users, also softlinks and special files.
Rsync or tar come to mind.
But you cannot use rsync, as the destination directory on the windows share has no understanding of these unix style users/perms. So you would have all files, but not useable for a restore.

tar would work (although bark on changing files aka logs), as it keeps all these user/perms inside the tarball.
But you cannot do incremental backups this way.

I think the best way would be to install a native backup client on the redhat box
and add it to your backup configuration just like you would with a windows machine.

Of course, that would imply:
- that your winsows backuptool does have a linux (redhat) client
- that you can open the needed port(s) to do the backup.

If you are limited to the ssh port, then one could use tunneling.

The native client has these advantages:
- one tool for the backup. One spot to look, modify, restore. Keep It Simple, Stu..
- ability to do incremental backups
- no need to spool the redhat data to one place only to have it backuped. This costs time and ressources needlessly.
- no timing issues and differences. If you would copy data to that windows share first, you would have to synchronize that copy with the backup. ie: copy must complete before backup starts.
This is errorprone.
And even if it is worked out, you will always -by design- have older data in the actual backup as you could have with an native client.

just my 2cents

[RussD]

Hey dude thanks for the input !

Thats kinda the theory I was coming to:

I thought use a backup software on the Red Hat Server to backup all the data to a folder on the HDD of the Red Hat Server but share this folder via Samba so that the Windows SBS backup routine can backup directly from the Red Hat Server.

Any recommendations for the backup software I need to put on - probably good to have something that can do the system and the data and compress it so I can use it to restore etc.. without Windows frying it.

Cheers again