Backup to another Windows PC in same lan (like CrashPlan)?

How-To
1

Hi,

I used CrashPlan to backup data from one Windows computer to another of my Windows PC.

It worked even if computers weren’t in same LAN (from internet).

I’d like to retreive a backup software which could do the same thing, or at least : backup to another PC in my LAN.

I know i can use a SMB network share as destination with a lot of backup software, Duplicati included, but are there others solutions ? With or without Duplicati ?

I heard about “webdav”; i don’t know if it could have any advantage over SMB ?

Thanks

2

You could go with various server solutions like webdav, smb, ftp, or ssh ftp.

Duplicati doesn’t itself provide any solution since it only acts as a client currently. You’ll have to depend on a 3rd party tool for this.

Sadly it’s a bit more complicated than Crashplans old solution, which I also really liked, but on the bright side it gives control and lots of options :slight_smile:

3

To clarify, the answer to this particular part is Yes, you should be able to have Duplicati push backups to a remote folder on your LAN assuming permissions are set correctly (write access, etc). I’m assuming it would work similarly to having duplicati back up to a local folder.

4

I have done backups from one LAN machine to another using a mapped drive letter and a UNC path for the destination (as well as SFTP), so I know it can be done.

However, when trying to use a mapped drive letter you need to be careful about under what account Duplicati is running. For example, if you log in as yourself and map the Z: drive but are running Duplicati as a service or another user that does NOT have a the Z: drive mapped (or worse, has it mapped differently than you) then you’ll run into “issues”.

For me the UNC path side of things worked a lot more easily, however the GUI doesn’t support browsing to a UNC destination so what I tend to do is get to where I want to go using Windows Explorer then copy the UNC path from the bar there and in paste it into Duplicati after clicking on the “Manually type path” link.

5

Thanks for all your reply.

So it can’t be as simple as with CrashPlan. I will try with the UNC patch, thanks for the tip.

I’m also testing others solutions; actually : UrBackup (server/client), GoodSync (direct p2p with account), Syncthings, etc. Some are more focused on synchronisation but even if there isn’t history file versionning it could be used as a complement with Duplicati (or another backup software).

Bye

2 Likes
6

Absolutely! I haven’t finished setting up “the other side” yet but my plan is eventually to use Duplicati to back up my machines to my on-site server then use Syncthing to off-site that a machine in another city.

I also looked at UrBackup (well, installed it and that’s about it) when I was searching for a CrashPlan replacement but ended up going with Duplicati. I’d be interested in hearing how your experience with it goes as we don’t yet have a Comparison page for UrBackup vs Duplcati. :slight_smile:

7

urbackup

IMHO, urbackup is the way to go if you want to backup files over a LAN between your own machines. In fact, as my kids grew up and my home LAN grew proportionally, I even ended up setting up urbackup on a cheap old PC running ubuntu and got excellent results.

The main thing about urbackup is that it allows you to perform system images in addition to file backup very quickly and with minimum disk space (deduplication). I did had to use it once to rebuild a machine with a dead OS disk and it worked flawlessly.

however, if you want to backup files over a cloud repo or outside of LAN, IMHO duplicati is a better option. (in fact I am trying to combine both but I get stuck with limitations due to low-level stuffs)

anyway, going back to your question (ie: using 1 machine to backup others on a LAN:)

  1. pick one machine with a very large disk, install the server.
  2. install the client on the other machines…
  3. you are done.

optionally, you can have another machine backup the server by following these specific steps:
(backing your primary urbackup server on another machine on the same LAN aka criss-cross urbackup)
4) stop your existing server process
5) install the urback server on the other machine
6) install the client on your main urbackup server, configure it to exclude the drive where your store your backups (to avoid doing a backup of backups!)
7) wait about 30 minutes for the 2 of them to exchange their keys and start backing up.
8) restart the urbackup service on your primary urbackup server.

8

I used to have Crashplan also. I now use Duplicati for my backups. I have all my local computers backup to an external backup drive connected to my main system. I also have the computers backup to Backblaze for cloud storage. This way I can get a quick restore from the local drive, but in case of disaster (my computers are destroyed or stolen or external drive fails), I can restore from my cloud backup.

I set up the external drive as a Shared drive on my network so it can be accessed from an LAN machine. Then I setup up separate folders on the share drive for each computer. Duplicati backs up each LAN computer to its folder on the share drive.

This works well. I just used Duplicati to restore one of my computers files to a new system when the computer died. I have used it many times for family members to recover files. And it costs me 1/10 of what I paid Crashplan for my offline storage.