Have any readers heard of any good free backup clients? Ideally it should be able to backup a specific list of files or folders to a remote FTP server, compress data, restore it if necessary, and be able to schedule tasks.
Oh, yeah, and it needs to run on Windows.
I don’t ask for much, do I?
FileZilla looked promising but did not seem to be working properly when I tested it; there are many other programs out there but most of them cost something. I don’t begrudge people charging for their software, I think they are welcome to do that if they want to. However, I may need this for over a thousand users, and even at $10 per client (a good deal) — that’s too much for this project.
Any ideas for free FTP backup clients? ;-) I am toying with the idea of creating my own simple one, or a collection of scripts to accomplish the same thing. I may wind up having to do the latter.
Have you looked at SyncBack?
http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/sbse.html
Feature list:
http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/compare.html
Whilst it doesn’t fulfill your requirement to be free, I’ve just released DataCocoon which does all the other things you need. And if you need a thousand copies of it we might be able to come to some agreement on price…
It sounds interesting, and I’ll take a look. However, the price requirement (free) is out of my hands — my job is to look for a free client ;-). Best wishes with your software efforts! Entrepreneurs make the world go round.
Thanks for stopping by!
I think you might want to check out rsync - http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/
Hmm. That is an interesting suggestion. I will look into it; my only reservation is that I would like the user to have some easy method of selecting which files should be backed-up — a gui of some kind would be nice.
I read your recent posts about UIs, and while I think I agree, I’m not sure I can sell a solution with no GUI to the powers that be.
I fully intend to look at it, though, it sounds like a good possibility.
Hey Phil,
I thought I had submitted this to you a few days ago, but it’s not here, so here’s my suggestion again.
It’s a program called SyncBack. They have a freeware version and a paid version for $25. For the features you’re looking for you’ll need the paid version. They do have non-profit pricing if you need more than 5 licenses.
http://www.2brightsparks.com/
I use it do backups at home.
Hope this helps!
You did submit it; it was held in moderation because there was more than one link, and I didn’t notice it until today. Whups!
Yes, I’ve seen that one. Like you said, I would need the paid version, which won’t work in this situation; I would need about 1200 licenses, and it’s not for a non-profit. ;)
Thanks for the link though, I appreciate it.