I just installed a client which will do backups over the internet, initial estimated backup time: 11 days.
The available workaround to speed up the initial backup are, as far as I am aware of:
- Install a local urbackupserver at the remote location; do a Image backup (if supported); copy that do a disk; go back to where your real backup server is; restore the image into a virtual machine; do a first backup from that machine to your server; change all the settings to point to the remote machine…
- For clients, wich only support file backup: At the remote location, copy all the files to an external medium, go back to your server, copy the files onto a machine which is already backuped (hope you’ve got enough space left somewhere), do a backup, then do a backup of the remote client. Then delete the files on the local client. Thanks to “Calculate file-hashes on the client” the files shouldn’t be transfered from the remote client.
Both procedures are relatively complicated to do.
It would be great if it would be possible to directly upload the files (and maybe also images) over the urbackup web interface. e.g.
- For file backup (without existing image backup): At the remote site, copy files on external medium, go back to urbackup-server site. Choose in the webinterface the remote client and upload the files directly from the external medium. Maybe paths and stuff won’t be exactly correct, but since urbackup uses the hashes of the files, that doesn’t really matter. After the first successful internet backup, that initial backup can be deleted.
- For image backups: Is the vhd the windows backup programm creates the same as, or at least readable by urbackup? Or does an other programm exist, that creates an usable vhd image? If yes: Create a image backup with windows backup on external medium, go to urbackup server site, upload the vhd to urbackup.
- For file backup (with existing image backup): Let’s assume we were able to upload the vhd to urbackup, or we made a normal internet image backup. Doesn’t matter, but we do have a valid image backup on the urbackup-server. So it would be great, if the urbackupserver could extract the initial file backup, directly out of the image backup. So for the first file backup no data need to be transfered at all.
It’s just some idea I had, about how it would be a lot easier to do the initial internet backups. Subsequent backups should be a lot faster than the initial one, since you won’t use internet backup for highly volatile data anyway.
Any chances that could be implemented? Any comments?