Home network use, Linux, Win, OSX, few inital questions

Hello:

I have a home network with the 3 OS mentioned in title. I’d like a no-frills, simple backup arrangement to, perhaps,
a dedicated computer. I just need backups, say, 2x / month, and don’t think I need archival history. Rolling snapshots?

Q: What would be a sensible server hardware setup?
Q: Which OS is generally chosen for the server?
Q: I’m not seeing OSX requirements for the client - what’s a minimum, 10.6? 10.7?
Q: Looks like one must build the Linux client, right?

Any YT video or webpage resources that talk about multi-OS URbackup would be helpful.

Appreciated!

I have a home network with the 3 OS mentioned in title. I’d like a no-frills, simple backup arrangement to, perhaps,
a dedicated computer. I just need backups, say, 2x / month.

  • You can really backup more often than this, in some use case a full is 40GB and an incremental 100MB (need to preperly exclude temp files)
    In this example a full every 2 month then an incremental per day, would be 46GB and offer much more granual restoration

don’t think I need archival history.

  • Archival is just a different way to expire backup. either
    you keep the last n backups, and eventually delete some if you run out of space but keep at least y backups.
    or you set a policy like : be able to restore from the last 14 days, then only from mondays until 3 months ago, then only from the 1st of the month up to last year
    Well Actually you could mix theses 2 policies, but it get harder to predict

Rolling snapshots?

  • Not sure what you mean here. At this moment Image backups are only for windows.

Q: What would be a sensible server hardware setup?

  • Hard to give an good advice
    Need not much cpu like dual/quad core is more than enought and not much ram like 4gb.
    Depends how much backup you want to keep, but total disk space would be maybe 3x what you want to backup

Q: Which OS is generally chosen for the server?

  • On linux you can use btrfs or zfs who have added functionality. I think the windows guys prefer some nas distribution with support for urbackup like freenas (i think t supports zfs too)

Q: I’m not seeing OSX requirements for the client - what’s a minimum, 10.6? 10.7?

  • No idea, just try to install :), at worst look for older urbackup version (1.4.x) if you use an old os

Q: Looks like one must build the Linux client, right?

  • Only if you want the gui , there s no package , but a 3 liner to wget a file, exec it , that install the client

Any YT video or webpage resources that talk about multi-OS URbackup would be helpfu

Hello,
I had a similar requirement a few years ago and after a lot of trying of different systems I now use URbackup with a dedicated server for the back up. To answer your question then:
I use FreeNAS as the server and have added 4 drives using zfs (so I can lose one drive and everything just keeps on working). Freenas is quite demanding on memory and 8GByte is the minimum recommended. Processor type doesn’t seem to matter - I use an old AMD processor quite happily.
You then create, what Freenas calls, a jail and install URbackup here. There is a web page that details exactly how to do this on the URbackup documentation. Done. Set up URbackup to backup when you want - it works happily with Windows and Macs - haven’t used Linux for a bit now as I prefer FreeBSD.
I would recommend that you really test your backup programme. It is easy to check files (as you can see them in the web interface and download them). You do need to check you can restore disk images - there seems to be a lot of questions on this web site about this.
Overall URbackup on FreeNAS works very well for me

It really depends on your requirements.
I use a very simple setup with a BananaPi and a 1TB disk attached. The disk is formatted with BTRFS. On the BananaPi I installed Openmediavault and then use the UrbackUp plugin.
The BananaPi is about 4 years old. Today there are much faster alternatives with ARM processor.
Total cost of the complete system is around 100-150 EURO and enough to backup a couple of laptops.
UrBackup uses very little ressources on the client. As user I do not notice when the system does a backup.

The BananaPi uses something like 3-5 Watt. So really no issue to keep it running for 24/7.