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Backups Docker Linux Windows

Urbackup – Open Source Network Backup

I know this is a little late for world backup day, but backups are needed everyday!

Today we will be talking about Urbackup. It is a Open Source network backup solution that you can use in your home or office network. I cannot express to you all the importance of a good backup solution. Working in the IT field as a consultant and MSP provider for many years I have seen my share of Clients who neglected their backups. Let me tell you, recovering from a failure without a good backup is not cheap. Remember it the question is not IF a failure will occur it is WHEN it will occur.

What is UrBackup?

Urbackup is a Web based backup solution that can backup Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Mac (in beta) Operating systems. You can install Urbackup Server on both Linux or Windows.

There are two types of agents that you can install, Local or Internet. Internet Agents allow your computers to be backed up over the internet, however it is slower and requires a lot more configurations and infrastructure. For the purpose of this article we will focus on local.

How does Urbackup Work?

As you can see from the above screen shot the interface is pretty easy to read. Each computer that you have an agent on will be listed in the dashboard and the status columns are color coded to let you know how your backups are looking.

Installed Local agents will allow your machine to connect to 1 (you can do more, but it requires addtional configuration) Urbackup server. Urbackup will automatically perform file and image based backups (Image based is for Windows Only).

Imaged based restores can be intitated by either converting the image to a .vhd and mounting the image to a Windows computer or as a virtual machine such as Hyper-V. You can also use the bootable recovery disk to restore your image to your hardware in the event of a hardware failure.

Urbackup also allows you to view the backups that have been taken and drill down into them to restore individual files as seen below.

Reports and Statistics are also available and will show you how much space you are using without having to log into the actual server.

How can I get Urbackup?

As I mentioned earlier Urbackup is able to be installed on Linux and Windows. It is also able to be installed in a container such as Docker and there are many NAS appliances such as Synology which you can run the container on and provide storage.

Closing

I hope you found this article helpful and if you would like to learn more about it please feel free to reach out. Also if you want to learn about a different backup solution, check out this post on Duplicati.

Please share this out ot your friends as it could helpful to others.

Categories
Backups

Duplicati – A free file based backup solution

This is a snapshot of what the Duplicati Dashboard looks like.

Do you have a bunch of Data that is not being protected? Maybe you have hundreds or thousands of family pictures that are just sitting on your PC hard drive just waiting to be lost in your next Hard drive crash? How about your High School or College paper that you have been working on for months, could you afford to have to rewrite it the night before it is due?

Well have I got the answer for you, Duplicati 2.0. Duplicati is a free web based file backup software that works on Windows, Mac, and a few Linux distros. The team behind Duplicati are constantly working on updating it and making improvements.

Duplicati offers many backend (destinations) to backup to including local and cloud based storage and offers 256 bit AES encryption to keep your backups nice an secure. It is Web based (it runs out of your web browser) and is very light weight so it does not take up a lot of resources on your Computer. Most importantly is the price point…. FREE!!!

As touched on earlier, you are able to backup to almost anywhere, like an external HDD or SD (like these ones here you can find on Amazon), a NAS or Network Attached Storage, or cloud based storage like Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox, AWS S3, Backblaze, or Microsoft Azure cloud Storage.

I have been running Duplicati on all my personal machines for a few months now and I have to admit it works great. The only downside that I have come across so far is the false positive messages that you get. Meaning if you have a file open that is supposed to be backed up, you will get a warning message that the file could not be backed up, but a recent update is supposed to fix a lot of those messages that we have been getting so I look forward to see what happens with that.

If you are interested in learning more about Duplicati, I suggest that you follow the link above. If you would like to setup Duplicati but are not sure where to start feel free to reach out to me via the Contact Us page. I would love to lend you a hand and I can offer a really great rate on a place to store your data.

Remember that the question is not IF your hard drive is going to die, it is a matter of WHEN your hard drive is going to die. It is just a matter of time, and data loss can be right around the corner.