What good free software is available for backing up a few PCs?

Solution 1:

Give BackupPC a try.

It's extremely space-efficient; can handle many types of connections; has a good web interface; needs no client-software; etc.

It's not push but pull-style backup, reducing the things your clients can screw up.

All-in-all we're very pleased with it.

Solution 2:

I've had pretty good experience with Cobian Backup. Runs as a service, can backup to compressed (Zip & 7Zip) and move to an off-site (FTP et al) location. I haven't tried to deploy it to several computers at once, but every other experience I've had with it has been superb.

Also, as Alex notes, it can send e-mail notification upon completion/failure, and I believe can be remotely admin'd.

Solution 3:

If they're Windows XP-based PCs, you can use the built-in NTBACKUP and fire it off from "Scheduled Tasks". This is a good "no third-party software" solution, and catches NTFS ACLs. You can backup to a file and then move it with FTP.

If you're not stuck with FTP, and perhaps concerned about bandwidth usage you could use one of the various rsync ports and an rsync server on the Linux machine. Cwrsync (http://www.itefix.no/cwrsync/) is a decent one, but beware that it doesn't replicate NTFS ACLs.

You could knock something together with, like, ZIP and a scheduled task to FTP the ZIP file, but if you're going to do that you might as well use NTBACKUP.

Solution 4:

I can recommend SyncBack. Even the free version has an impressive feature list.

SyncBack is our freeware program that helps you easily backup and synchronize your files to: the same drive; a different drive or medium (CDRW, CompactFlash, etc); an FTP server; a Network; or a Zip archive.