Network Backup Ideas?

[ulater6000]

It's been a while since I've posted here, but I have a problem with network backups that I'm not sure how to solve.

I have a small business I support who has a Small Business Server 2003 with one of it's local hard drives setup to share on the network. The entire small office save ALL of their work to this shared drive on the server. I need to setup this drive to be backed up over the network nightly to a Linksys network drive. The entire network is running gigabit.

Ideally I would like it to do differential backups during work nights and maybe a full backup every Friday night.

I have tried NTIshadow and FreeFileSync, but there always seems to be some PC that is accessing a file on this shared drive whenever the backup runs causes an error. (I cant tell them to turn off the PCs because they use RDP). Also the backup drive has thousands of very small files, so even on gigabit the backups don't ever seem to finish by the next work morning.

So what I'm asking is advice on some good backup software that can backup a file that is open and can do differential backups to speed up the whole process.

Thanks

Also, I wasn't sure if this is the best section for this post... Mods feel free to move this if there is a better one.

 

[office politics]

ntbackup with shadow copies enabled should be able to handle open files. you could use robocopy if you only needed the latest version of the file. ...or you could use robocopy for the disk to disk and then run the backup drive to tape.

How much data are we talking about? How many files? how fast are the drives?

I would try full backups first, then diffs, then incs.

Ntbackup

 

[CntdwnToExtn]

Hmmm,
I'd say xcopy for something free. Create a few scripts with the /D (date) switch to get the differentials. Then a full backup on the weekend.
Use the /C to continue on errors, pipe it to a log.

BrightStor ArcServe is good for a paid solution, you can get "open file" licenses and such that will access files in use.

 

[carnageX]

Can always use SyncToy as well. Made by Microsoft and is free.

 

[remixedcat]

Acronis and Symantec have some nice tools.

 

[ulater6000]

I looked at acronis and symantec and like what they have, but sadly its beyond the budget. I ended up going buying NTI backup; I have not set it up yet to try it, but it's the cheapest product that supports backing up open files on Server 2003 that I could find.