At work I was asked to put together a server on the cheap which I’m fine with as long as everyone understands that doing so has some implicated risk. A server cast on a desktop machine is a risky proposition. You don’t have power support from redundant power supplies, you don’t have RAID which can protect you from hard drive failure, and the machine is not designed to be a very robust server in any stretch of the imagination – it just lacks the processing and RAM that would really answer the need strongly. However, once I covered those risks, everyone was still on-board with me moving forward. I rolled a server out, used an Operating System that would be best to not speak about and set up the software.

Being a part of the technology from the great beast, of course it didn’t work well at first. There were hidden requirements, annoying requirements. Requirements with “dots” in their name. Once I figured out the how and got the thing running I took it down from the lab place I was working on it in and moved it to its permanent home in our machine room. From the point of deployment which was a few days ago I’ve had a niggling worry that the thing is going to fail, as any machine could when it relies on just one hard drive. I needed a backup solution.

The built-in backup solution in the “product” that I was “using” as an “operating system” was just not going to work. I needed something that would work well and be free above all else. I went to the great sage and eminent junkie Google and eventually ran across FBackup. It’s not glorious, it’s not complicated, but it is exactly what I was looking for. So now with that software installed, and it’s quite good in fact for the “operating system” I was using I don’t have to worry so much about that “server” going down. If it does, eh, who cares, at least the data will be safe. For those that wonder where I put my backups, I have a NAS, a handy dandy DroboNAS that isn’t the fastest tool in the shed, but at 16TB, it certainly has a lot of space and it’s RAID means that I don’t have to worry so much about hardware failure with that box.

So, hooray for FBackup. It’s free, and while I can’t spare any change for it, what I can do is recommend it. If you are looking for something handy and you can’t get your hands on a native installation of ‘tar’ like you should be using, this is quite good. It’s not Backup Exec of course, but then, I would rather chew a lightbulb than even hear the words “Backup Exec” spoken aloud.