Backup Server for Office

[NERForBUFFIN]

Hello, I'm an IT guy working for a small-ish business with around 100 employees. I come here asking for help to set up a backup server for important documents stored on our employees' machines, seeing as I'm sick of taking care of everyone's system individually when they click into a baity email and get a virus. I was wondering if I'd be able to create a server that will let me rollback the systems in case they ever got a virus. If possible, would it be easier to use a Windows server or Linux? I would also like help figuring out what kinds of programs I should use to mass backup the systems on a set schedule.

[Morgan MLGman]

Sadly, you need to pay for that if you want automation. With that in mind, I can recommend checking out Unitrends Backup - it's simple to use and supports backing up physical machines as well as bare metal restore and dissimilar hardware restore (you can inject drivers when restoring to different hardware) which can be useful to you. It comes in either a physical appliance or a virtual machine which you can deploy for VMware.

 

If you have any further questions regarding what I wrote, let me know.

[NERForBUFFIN]

4 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

Sadly, you need to pay for that if you want automation. With that in mind, I can recommend checking out Unitrends Backup - it's simple to use and supports backing up physical machines as well as bare metal restore and dissimilar hardware restore (you can inject drivers when restoring to different hardware) which can be useful to you. It comes in either a physical appliance or a virtual machine which you can deploy for VMware.

 

If you have any further questions regarding what I wrote, let me know.

Thank you for the response. I don't mind having to put money into this, just wondering what needs to be done if it even could be done. I will look more into Unitrends and see if that'll fit what I'm trying to do. We have a few servers set up already and are currently using VMware to keep track of our different kinds of servers, but the only question I have is if Unitrends Backup is its own system or needs an OS to operate.

[Morgan MLGman]

14 minutes ago, NERForBUFFIN said:

Thank you for the response. I don't mind having to put money into this, just wondering what needs to be done if it even could be done. I will look more into Unitrends and see if that'll fit what I'm trying to do. We have a few servers set up already and are currently using VMware to keep track of our different kinds of servers, but the only question I have is if Unitrends Backup is its own system or needs an OS to operate.

It's a system based on CentOS-like Linux, you could buy the VM version if you have a VMware environment at work, I can actually provide you with some insider-type info about that It's around the price of Veeam and a bit more expensive than Nakivo but both of those products are aimed at virtual environments (ex. backing up VMs) and not physical machines, and Unitrends is just the tool to do that.

[NERForBUFFIN]

1 minute ago, Morgan MLGman said:

It's a system based on CentOS-like Linux, you could buy the VM version if you have a VMware environment at work, I can actually provide you with some insider-type info about that It's around the price of Veeam and a bit more expensive than Nakivo but both of those products are aimed at virtual environments (ex. backing up VMs) and not physical machines, and Unitrends is just the tool to do that.

Awesome. I'll look into getting the VM version and will come back to this thread if I can't end up using it and need another solution. Thank you for the assistance.

[leadeater]

5 hours ago, NERForBUFFIN said:

Hello, I'm an IT guy working for a small-ish business with around 100 employees. I come here asking for help to set up a backup server for important documents stored on our employees' machines, seeing as I'm sick of taking care of everyone's system individually when they click into a baity email and get a virus. I was wondering if I'd be able to create a server that will let me rollback the systems in case they ever got a virus. If possible, would it be easier to use a Windows server or Linux? I would also like help figuring out what kinds of programs I should use to mass backup the systems on a set schedule.

Setup Folder Redirection to a server and configure Volume Shadow Copies to take snapshots at what ever frequency you want. If they get a virus or crypto that nukes the files you can use Previous Versions to pull back the files before they got damaged, you can also use it for oops I deleted that or oops made the wrong edit.

 

You should then configure Windows Server Backup to a NAS to protect against the server itself getting compromised.

 

You could go down the path of using Endpoint Backups but it's actually a lot simpler to deal with centralized storage and much more efficient. If any of the devices are laptops you can use Offline Files to cache their files on to the device then when they are back on the network it'll sync back to the server.

 

As for dealing with the infected devices setup Windows Deployment Services with either MDT or Group Policy to install all the required software, then you can just reimage infected devices quickly. Once the user logs back in all the files will be there showing in Documents etc but actually they are sitting on the server.

[leadeater]

Extra info in links below