[kwlug-disc] Open source backup tools

[Andrew Kohlsmith (mailing lists account)]

> On Dec 5, 2015, at 2:39 PM, B.S. <bs27975 at yahoo.ca> wrote:
> If there were a FOSS solution out there that you would trust / meets your criteria, you would already have found it from the googling you will no doubt have already done. (Given the costs involved, Exchange being a proprietary commercial system meaning proprietary commercial backup solutions, organization size inherent to Exchange use, such organizations desiring a sufficient liability attack surface should it be needed, and so on.)

I am *not* a windows admin and barely a user, but from the duplicati page there seems to be a service in windows called Volume Snapshot Service which helps with this.

A little more googling led me to https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb968832%28v=vs.85%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396 which describes it in more detail:

"The Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) is a set of COM interfaces that implements a framework to allow volume backups to be performed while applications on a system continue to write to the volumes.

and a little more:

"Correctly performing backup and restore operations requires close coordination between the backup applications, the line-of-business applications that are being backed up, and the storage management hardware and software. The Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS), which was introduced in Windows Server® 2003, facilitates the conversation between these components to allow them to work better together. When all the components support VSS, you can use them to back up your application data without taking the applications offline.

It sounds like any OSS solution that supports VSS should work (and it lists several but not specifically Exchange Server), but YMMV and IANAL and any other set of acronyms which might be applicable...

> So, if you haven't already found a solution to your taste - do you have any choice but to skin the cat in a different way / look at the problem/solutions from a different perspective?

Or engage the community and see if anyone else has seen anything. This question isn’t any different than many others posted here. It’s what we’re here for. :-)

> If there is no evident (and you inherently wouldn't trust the non-evident) solution to the problem you are trying to solve - isn't it time to attack the problem from a different vector?

I don’t think it’s at that point yet.  Half of this battle is learning the terms. Until I was googling for windows and duplicity I hadn’t heard of VSS. Now that I know the term, I’ve found a LOT more info, including the following links which came from “microsoft exchange support VSS”:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2012/06/04/everything-you-need-to-know-about-exchange-backups-part-1.aspx
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/aa579095%28v=exchg.140%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396
http://searchexchange.techtarget.com/tutorial/Backing-up-Exchange-Server-with-Microsoft-VSS

It *seems* like Exchange Server does in fact support VSS, which means that Duplicati can take proper backups of a running Exchange Server.  Some experimentation is now needed to find out the specifics and whether VSS is supported by other OSS backup programs.

It would seem that your statement that since he couldn’t find anything with his google-fu it simply mustn’t exist isn’t quite true. My google-fu is weak but sometimes juggling the terms and following some odd leads can find a solution that is hiding just below the surface.

e.g. “oss backup windows vss” yields all kinds of solutions:

http://burp.grke.org/
http://www.arecavss.com/
https://www.bareos.org/en/
http://www.cyberciti.biz/open-source/awesome-backup-software-for-linux-unix-osx-windows-systems/

-A.