Rsync - help please

[Hasslehogg]

Hi all

i was wondering if you can help me please, we are trying to use Rsync to move our Veeam backup file from the remote server to the central server. We have tested and proven it works very well, but our company have concerns over it being a free piece of software without proper support.

If I can come up with some kind of list of known company's that use this software, Ican prove to them that this isn't a risk and that it is widespread out there and a lot of other companies use this software. This will help my case of getting rsync approved, i know Veeam recommend it which is a good start for remote sites with no hardware acceleration, but if any of you guys can also confirm you use it and the company you work for i would appreciate it please.

I have shown my bosses all the results and even though they are the best available (we also tested DoubleTake) they wont be convinced until i have proven it is "safe & reliable" to use (

Also if anyone knows of any other info that shows why we should use rsync, it would be appreciated, the more ammo the better and yes i have googled already )

i appreciate your help

thanks

[tsightler]

If your management has yet to accept open source software in general as a valuable tool in modern computing environments then I'm not sure how your going to convince them. Linux and open source software run something like 60-70% of the servers on the Internet, between Linux, Apache, MySQL, and other open source successes, if they're that far behind the times it's going to be difficult to convince them.

While rsync is a "foreign" tool for Windows, it's a standard tool on Unix/Linux systems and has been for about a decade. Every linux/unix admin learns about rsync as one of the first commands and no modern Linux/Unix system ships without it. The rsync you're running on Windows is likely "cwrsync" which is short for "Cygwin" rsync. Cygwin is an open source, commercially supported product, currently owned and supported by Redhat, which allows many open source tools such as rsync to be easily compiled and run on Windows. In other words, cwrsync is simply the Windows version of the very same rsync which is in use on millions of Linux/Unix systems in the world.

So, if you're looking for a list of companies that use rsync, just look at any company that is not completely Windows centric, like Oracle, Sun, HP, IBM, Redhat, Novell. Apple OS X has shipped with a native rsync tool since at least 10.4 (previously it was easy to add rsync support to Macs). Rsync is such a common too that many dedicate NAS devices like the Drobo, QNAP, Synology, Netgear, etc support the rsync protocol natively.

There are plenty of books that describe using rsync for backup of systems, including Windows, such as "Backup & Recovery: Inexpensive Backup Solutions for Open Systems" which covers using rsync for backup of Windows systems, even things like Exchange and MSSQL.

[Hasslehogg]

Tsightler

thanks for that, appreciate it

[Gostev]

Yep, thanks Tom - appreciate your assistance on this one.

Just wanted to add that we are also looking at integrating similar functionality into the base product down the road, so this is something you can expect while making the decision now to invest in Veeam technology.