Windows server backup solution

Question

I need a kind of free backup/synchronisation software for Windows Server 2008. I tried several programs but none of them had required features.

I need a software which could do one of following two options: 1) Compare two local directories and upload files, which are missing/different in second dir, to FTP

or 2) Mirror local directory to ftp but keep files in ftp compressed and split into archives of particular size (because of limited max number of files in ftp).

Could someone suggest any programs which could do this job?

Answer 1

It sounds like a general backup utility would do the job for you if you don't absolutely require it to use FTP.

Check out my answer to a question about Windows Server Backup on StackOverflow if a volume-level backup utility would work for you: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/813019/windows-2008-server-backup/813191#813191.

If you need more granularity (individual files and folders rather than whole disk volumes), check out Microsoft's Robocopy command-line utility. It has many options that let you control file copying--so much so that you could really build a custom backup solution on top of it. It's included in Windows Vista and later, and it's available for download as part of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=72969). Once it is installed, or if you have Windows Vista or later, open a command prompt and type "robocopy /?" (without quotes) to see all of the options.

Answer 2

If it doesn't absolutely have to be FTP you could go a long way with DFS; it's even built into the OS.

Answer 3

You could probably script something with Powershell, which is included with Server 2008.

Answer 4

Thank you for your answers. I created a simple python script which does the job. At first, I was afraid of possible poor performance but in real environment it works quite fast even with big number of files.