I work in a medium-sized company in Belgium but we have a few offices and factories around the world.
We were not satisfied anymore with Symantec Desktop and Laptop Option and so were looking for another backup solution for our laptops that possibly would also allow to backup through the Internet (in 2014 DLO still doesn’t do that…)
And UrBackup is one of the only software available to do that and that doesn’t cost our total monthly IT budget!
We are very impressed with UrBackup so far, you really did a great job, it’s very simple, sensible and everything is very clear and it really is money worth software.
I just have one question and a few comments :
So we have a few different sites with different IP ranges so we’ll have a local UrBackup server in the important sites and do Internet backup where no local server is available but a few users will roam between 2 sites with a local UrBackup server. I guess those will backup on both servers, while it’s not too bad as it’s on LAN, I guess it will do a first full backup the first time and then incremental on the local server independently from the other site backup ? Is there a way to make it backup only to 1 UrBackup server ?
Comments :
Would it be possible to have the Backup status have more information than just Ok or No recent backups for backups older than 1 day, I wish it would say today, 1 day old, 2 days old, 1 week old or something similar so you could sort them by last backed up, I don’t expect our laptops to be able to back up every single day.
As we are using WPKG to deploy software (although I know UrBackup has its own update mechanism which I didn’t try), I wish there was a way to determine the correct version of UrBackup is installed but I didn’t find it, it’s not present in the Uninstall (Add/Remove Programs) information or in the file versions, can you tell me if there is one or add it ?
You can configure which servers a client uses by modifying the server_idents.txt . The client will only use servers which are listed there. This is a security feature (see http://www.urbackup.org/administration_manual.html#x1-230004.3 ). So if you want the clients to “roam” between servers give them the save identity and public/private key (by copying). If you want them to only use the server they first see you don’t have to change anything.
I’ll add the version entry to the uninstall registry key.
Oh I missed that part in the manual, so it shouldn’t backup to multiple servers unless we set it up to, so I can assume if we install the software while the laptop is on its main site, it will get the settings from that server and only backup to that one be it on LAN or through the Internet, that’s great!
Thank you for your help, I just have to test Internet only clients now
One note/doubt about backing up to multiple servers :
I actually installed UrBackup on a test server first and had the client (1.4.2) on my laptop backing up to that server.
And then reinstalled to another server for production and had the client from the first installation still installed on my laptop and it did automatically proceed to backup to the new server which is why I thought it would automatically backup to any server it would find.
And I now see that the new server was added in the server_idents (I didn’t add it manually) and I now have the old server identity and the new server identity on a new line…
But we did just notice on another computer where we installed the client for the test server (which we didn’t use since then) it gave a message about a new server being detected (my colleague didn’t really pay attention to it) and it didn’t add the identity and wasn’t backing up…
I have more question about multiple sites :
We will have only one UrBackup server for multiple sites which are connected through MPLS or VPN and have different ranges so broadcast packets will not reach remote sites.
Following the administrator guide, we have to add those computers as extra clients, we will do that for the computers that are mainly at the remote sites, but for information, will those backup normally when at the main site (where the UrBackup server is) and what about computers that are mostly on the main site, will they not backup at remote sites unless we add them as extra clients (and can we do that afterwards) ?
If it did indeed automatically add the second server this is a security issue. I’ll have a look at this area. If you have any debug logs of this occuring, that would be helpful.
Adding it as extra client just causes the server to additionally send a directed UDP paket to that address (additionally to the broadcast). Clients still get discovered by broadcast.
I don’t think I’ll mess with that, it might have more settings than the ones I want to copy (identity, clients, etc, I just want what’s in the settings tab).
