Backup Solution for small Netware / OES network

Thanks for the suggestions. I have a few follow-up questions:

Does a tool such as Beyond Compare handle open files? And how would it deal with backing up Groupwise? As far as I can see, each 'session' in Beyond Compare would sync one folder, so we would need to do it in 3 sessions - for the Sys and Data volumes on our server, and for the accounts on the Windows box. Can a single script be created which would run these one after the other?

Ghost for Netware is apparently no longer available, and I'm afraid the rest of the last paragraph lost me a bit (sorry, but I'm the closest thing we have to an IT manager and I'm not at all close). Can you explain what is a Physical-to-Virtual migration tool, and what's meant by a VMWare environment?

I did come across a disk imaging solution for Netware called Portlock Storage manager which seems to do what we want as far as that side of things is concerned. However the Portlock site makes no mention of OES, and I'd be reluctant to invest in it if it became redundant once we migrated to OES (I've emailed an enquiry but had no response so far).

BC is both a GUI-based tool and a command line script handler.
This means that it will handle running it in a script just fine.
Open files won't be perfect sbapshots, so you'd likely need to schedule a GW shutdown with CRON on the Netware box with the BC Copy job.
Creating a batch file with 3 copy jobs is easy.  (I use this for my own backups every night to a NAS, and I run 8 separate jobs to backup data from various sources.

VMWare and Hyper-V are two competing "virtualization" products.  The simple form is that they act as emulators and present a virtualized hardware instance of an entire computer to the user.
You can then install your own OS, applications, and data -- just like a separate physical box, but it runs "inside" another box.
These solutions are cheap/free for basic functionality, and a quick Google search will turn up a LOT more info.

I suggest this because they store the data in physical "hard disk" files that can easily be backed up, giving you machine snapshot capabilities.
Note that more advanced backups are possible (like live migration),
but may require higher versions.

I bring this idea up because the various P2V tools would work very similarly to Ghost, but have the added advantage that you can directly "run" the image on another hardware setup.
 

Hi,

My personal opinion is:

Buy a new server with 3 or more 146GB HD and 4 GB of RAM.
You can guarantee hardware fault tolerance and hardware replacement.

Try one of these products for virtualizazion VMware ESXi and Citrix XenServer as your preference. I don't known Hyper-V. Xen on SLES is not a good choice for me.

At the moment VMware is the top, Citrix offer VMotion and centralized managment for more than one nodes at no cost.

Virtualization give you the ability to make a very simple disaster recovery, like Veeam FastSCP.
After you have your virtualized environment you can do a NetWare hardware upgrade from your physical to newly virtual NetWare server.

After that you can slowly install an additional OES Linux with eDirectory, DHCP, DNS, Novell Domain Services for Windows ad start do tests to migrate your users to Linux.

For backup you can use you can choose from many strategies. You can start using a Windows XP that map NetWare volumes and copy them on another disk or buy a professional backuup software (Tapeware, BackupExec) or buy a NAS like Buffalo and schedule a copy.

Some software like AllwaySync let's you at very low price (100$) to sync or to backup (saving modified or deleted files).

Write down your objectives, how many time do you have to restore all your systems ? Are your tools able to respect that requirements ? How many it costs ?

Hope this can help you,
Giovanni Coa

Sorry to jump into this late.  Take a look at SEP at www.sepusa.com  We just put this in for a school district with great success.  Easy to setup and not bad on cost.  Plus it supports a lot of different OS/NOS.

Scott

Hi,

Firstly, sorry for the delay in getting back to this - we're a small outfit and I only get to deal with IT issues intermittently.

All the suggestions have been helpful and given much food for thought. I've split the points between BillBach and NothingSirius - the former for pointing me towards BeyondCompare, an excellent (and cheap!) solution for backing up data files, and the latter for the recommendation of NovaStor, which is the only fully-featured network backup solution I've come across which supports both Netware and Linux and also offers bare metal recovery.