Laptop Backup Questions

[Biskit]

Hi,

I'm a newbie to Backup Exec.  I've just downloaded and installed BESR on my laptop.  I'm looking for a backup solution for my laptop that has the ability to backup to a remote server, so for instance when I'm on the road my laptop will backup over the Internet to a server at my office.

I think Backup Exec has this feature in the form of "Offsite Copy" using FTP to transfer my backup files?  Is this the only way to achieve backing up to a remote location when I'm on the road travelling?

Please can someone also confirm whether it is correct that you can only perform an "Offsite Copy" if performing a full disk-based backup?  The problem I have is a backup of my hard disk will be around 200Gb so it is totally unthinkable to try and FTP 200Gb over the Internet to my FTP server!!!  What I'd much prefer to do is select specific files/folders of high importance that contain for example 50Mb of data in total, then just FTP that to my office, but I can't see any way to add Offsite Copy to a file/folder backup.  I can't figure out why this option isn't there for file/folder backups.  Can someone explain, or tell me where I'm going wrong if it is possible?

Many thanks in advance,
Matt

[Markus_Koestler]

Sad enough, but that is the way the product works: Offsite copy IS only available for volume based full and incremental backups.

[Sush---]

Hello Biskit,
   While reading through your post, this idea just stuck me about backing just important files and folder.

AS per your post you do not want to backup the whole drives which can be around 200 GB but just some Important files and folder which can be around 50 MB.

So here is the Tailor made solution for you.


1) Create a new small drive on the server .... lets say 5 GB  (or even less than that if your files are going to be in MBs)
2) Create a backup job for this drive which will back it up to your FTP site and schedule the job accordingly
3) Keep your important files and folders on this new drive
4) If you want to backup any data just move it to this drive and then later you can move it back to the original location if you want to

I am sure this will work to backup very minimum data (But VERY IMPORTANT DATA) to the FTP site whenever you are on road or elsewhere.

NOTE that this will work only for Files and Folders created by the User and not system created folders like MY Documents, etc

Thanks,
-Sush...

[Biskit]

Hi Sush,

Thanks for your reply but I'm not sure that will work?

Imagine you have a laptop and you work away from the office a lot of the time.  In the case of the customer I'm testing this for they have users who take their laptop and work overseas for up to 6 months at a time, so they go for long period of time without connecting to the LAN.  They need to be able to back up their data to a central store (on the LAN) while they are working remotely.

Assume the laptop HDD is already partitioned as one big C: drive so there is no easy option to re-partition the hard disk to contain a D: drive just for documents.

Also as mentioned they are not on the LAN so can't store their data to a server.  (They work offline for the majority of the time).

So I don't think your suggestion will work in this instance?

I suppose we can somehow copy the backup file to a remote location via a script while the user is VPN'd to the office?  That adds a whole other level of complexity though outside of BESR. 

Is there a reason BESR doesn't allow Offsite Copy to file/folder backups?  I can't understand why this option would be missing for file/folder backups?

Thanks,
Matt

[Sush---]

Sure enough as I said that this will not work for all the Users. This is just a Tailor made workaround which you can you for any specific user. If the laptops are already partitioned then you may have to re-partition it if you are going with this solution. Also you may think  to use this in  future for laptops which are not partitioned.

Thanks,
-Sush...