Genie-soft Backup Manager (or other utils)

Dance Commander

I'm setting up a backup system for a friend's home office, but I've never really done much backing up of my own files, aside from creating ghost images. I know exactly what I want done, but I'm not sure if the software I'm looking at will do it.
Here's what needs to happen:

• Server gets files in specified folders from four different hard drives available on the network. If the network drive is not available, server ignores it. This should be done every day, or however we schedule it. The backup from each network drive is stored in a separate folder.
• Server compares these files to the current backups: if changes have been made to file1, file1 is replaced with the newer version. If changes have not been made, nothing happens. Essentially I want the most recent version of any file the server has ever seen on the backup drives.
• Server makes adjustments as necessary to the backup on two drives at once, these two drives are exactly the same size and for all intents and purposes are mirrors of each other (although not actually in RAID).
• These backups would need to be either in plain, windows legible file structure, or something very standard like .zip. We don't want to have to use the backup software to get at the backups.

Note that this same effect could be accomplished by just dragging and dropping the folders to be backed up to each drive on the server once every day, and selecting the "overwrite files with the same file name" option. Basically the only difference between the backup and what is on the computers is that it contains a day-old version of all current files as well the last version of any deleted file.

I know this is pretty long, but his current backup solution is broken beyond belief, and is stupid on a level I can barely articulate. I want to make sure we get this right the first time, before I go back to school.

Er, right, the question. Does anyone have experience with GBM? Will it do this? Can you recommend something else that will? The primary issue I have with GBM is that based on what the documentation says, I think I'd need to install it separately on each computer that's being backed up, which I don't want. I want the whole shebang to be centralized, so adjustments can be made easily.

blincoln

You can do what you're describing for free with robocopy and a very simple batch file, or a GUI utility like Syncback (which is also free).

Dance Commander

Boy, you're smart.