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Comment by bkmartin | Hacker News Reader

How would one do something similarly easy and economically efficient for a Windows platform? We've looked at different services but they are always so expensive. I would love a piece of software that we can place on each server and let it do its thing.... of course there is always SQL Server to contend with, again... expensive solutions exist.

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Check out Crashplan. You can use their software for incremental backups to the destination of your choice at no cost, and it's multi-platform provided you install Java.

Another Crashplan fan here. You can also install the Crashplan client on headless Linux-based NAS devices, so long as they can run Java (such as ReadyNAS).

I feel your pain. I actually ported Duplicity to Windows about 3 years ago for a client, but the code was never merged (or commented on).[1]

In the end, that client decided that it was easier to use a commercial package, given their typical use case. Tried Carbonite (didn't work, support unhelpful) but settled on JungleDisk. YMMV.

1. https://code.launchpad.net/~kevinoid/duplicity/windows-port

Duplicati[1] is essentially duplicity reimplemented for windows. I use that on few computers and it seems to mostly work.

1. http://www.duplicati.com/

I haven't use it but some of our customers use it and seems to work pretty well.

Also it's easy to use: http://www.memset.com/blog/backup-your-windows-server-memsto...

has a very stupid limitation: can not run as a service. Programmer is struggling since years to implement this feature.

Personally I'd probably use something to sync the lot over to a linux box and do the rest of the work from there. Depends on how much data you need to sync / how many servers are involved. Could be a pain to restore too (depending on the type of data you're backing up) so you would want to weigh all of that up too. With the Sql Server backups you could run periodic backups from Sql Server itself and have those backed up - depending on the data this could be really suboptimal but I think sql server allows incremental backups in the backup set, doesn't it? Been a number of years since I've had to deal with it.

You can use some sort of rsync alternative to get the content from the windows boxes to the linux machine (cwrsync is recommended - though I've never used it).

    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/528298/rsync-for-windows
    https://www.itefix.no/i2/cwrsync

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