Anyone know of any user friendly, FOSS, backup programs that work on Windows? If they were cross-platform that would be a bonus. Asking for a friend (no really, a family member)

  • Urbackup. It does automatic backups of both files and whole disk image of all computers in the network and it’s set and forget. Once the server is set, you just need to install the client on every machine you need to backup, it will take all the settings automagically from the network.

    •  esaru   ( @esaru@beehaw.org ) 
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      11 months ago

      Yes, and it works very well. A friend of mine is using it on his Surface Go backing up to the local system (with high frequency for case of editing/deleting files accidentially) and to his cloud storage simultaneously (with daily frequency for case of hardware loss).

  • Not free as in foss. But free as in beer.

    You can use xpenology or just a synology disk station with active backup for business. It does quite well with windows and just runs in the background.

    Before using that I use urbackup ,which is FOSS. It also worked quite well.

  • Urbackup has windows and linux backup agents and I believe is open source, but I don’t know if it has a windows server.

    Veeam is pretty good, but not open source and the community version is limited to ten agents.

  • Not Foss but very nice to use: Veeam

    It’s free for home and commercial use but limited to one backup job.
    You could install a backup server version of it in a VM (Veeam B&R) for (I believe) 15 backup jobs in total.

    I use it at home and we sell and deploy it at work so my opinion is biased but I really like the product.

    •  Nix   ( @nix@merv.news ) 
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      211 months ago

      Looking through yhe website has me a bit confused. If I want to use this and backup my computer to say Google Cloud. Do I have to set up a VM with google cloud and install software or what? I can’t seem to find any info on what the price will look like

      • I had backed it up to an external drive. If I remeber correctly, there may be an option to remotely connect to google cloud from within the kopia app, but you don’t need to create any VM. I don’t have access to Windows to test it now, but you can always download the all the explore it.

  • You’ll need to think of “backup” as a different thing if you are looking at the free space. For instance, I can backup my data onto discs, but it costs buying discs. I can also make lots of copies of my images and videos automatically using SyncThing (which is open source), but it requires multiple computers to really be considered a “backup”.

    • I wouldn’t trust SD cards with being backups. Data retention on Flash is a finicky issue, and SD cards are the worst of them all. Even SSDs have been known to suddenly lose their data when not powered on for some time. HDDs and DVD-Rs still have the best retention rates… but still don’t forget to follow 3-2-1.

  •  ɔiƚoxɘup   ( @Quexotic@beehaw.org ) 
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    11 months ago

    This doesn’t meet your criteria because not FOSS, but hear me out…

    I used synctoy for a while and it can sometimes be glitchy. I switched to aomei backupper [sic]. It’s basically shareware with a few nags. It seems pretty solid.

    Only thing that I think would be better would be to use robocopy with the mirror switch. For help getting the syntax down and scheduling it with task scheduler, gpt3 should have you covered.

    Robocopy is already built into win7, 8, 10, and 11.

    For foss, I looked at bakula, kopia, and duplicati. It’s been a while since I looked into them so I honestly can’t recall why I didn’t switch to them. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

  • Lots of good recommendations here!

    For user friendly software Veeam Endpoint, Synology Active Backup, and Duplicati would be my top 3. They all let you restore easily with a GUI that is easy to navigate, support email notifications natively for failures/warnings, and support VSS on windows without external scripts.

    Kopia, Restic, and similar open source projects also work well on a technical level, but are about the farthest thing from user friendly as they require custom scripting to perform VSS snapshots before backup and send notifications after, and are not very easy to use for restoring files.

  • What’s your backup target (to where are these backups being sent?)?

    Are you looking for actual Backup-strategy apps or just data sync as a form of backup (I wouldn’t recommend this approach unless you can setup multiple destinations and some form of differencing).

    Also, how will backups be validated? Will there be a monthly check for a while to verify files? Maybe a quarterly restore test until you trust it’s working right? Who’s going to do this?

    Just some questions to consider. Good luck, backup is so much fun!

    • Thanks - realistically I’d probably be looking at a backup to an external drive. I am looking for a ‘backup-strategy’ rather than a dara sync. Regular checks might well not happen so it would be good if these were built in (like with deja-dup on Linux)