Fog as a backup tool?

[hariskar]

I want to take full backups of 5 Windows 10/11 PCs at work using an open source project. I intend to schedule the backups between late night and morning before we open. I want to take backup of my main PC every night and backups of the rest PCs eg once a week.
I was using fog according to this scenario many years ago without any problem.

Why is it not suggested to use fog as a backup tool? Everyone suggests Clonezilla. Isn’t fog like an automated Clonzilla without the need of manual backups using a usb stick regarding the backup function?

Thank you!

[heix75]

Don’t mess up system backup and data backup!

Why you want to backup entire machine daily?

If you have important data in the PC, backup this data only!

Even better - build your infrastructure in this way, that the important data is not in the users PC. Set up network fileserver/NAS or other storage, cloud etc and keep your important files there - via automatic script or other method!
Of course the fileserver/NAS should be backup’ed as well - but most likely those will already include some failsafe methods (RAID etc.) in case of disk fail.

If PC fails, then replace the PC, deploy ready-to-use system image (with all your important software) and reconnect to the fileserver/data source. Thats it!

This way you have the flexibility (to restore even single file only - not entire PC) and it is also cost effective.

[hariskar]

@heix75 Thanks a lot for reply!
I use a medical lab program that stores clients data and examinations results almost all day. Of course I take incremental SQL backups.
So if something breaks I would like to have a recent PC backup to only restore SQL.
I used Macrium for that and now I use UrBackup which is open source but not widely used and I wonder if Fog would be a better solution.

[heix75]

@hariskar

I didn’t really catch the described use case…
But anyway, if application stores something in the database, then the database need to be backed up, of course. Fully and incrementally also (separate logic).

If you use application that stores data in the same machine where it is installed, better would be to configure it to store data on the remote database, e.g on specific database server or some other way.
You can create network drive or other remote storage and point your database files there - if needed to be separate (for each PC).

This way you have all the data in the same place, and you can make backups of this server or drive more easilly.

Backuping entire PC with database in it - this can be done, but why?
It feels strange.

Example:
Lets say, employees in your company are working with important documents.
Do you really want to backup of entire PC (with os and applications and data), instead of storing those documents on secure and reliable remote storage?
Better solution is to simply make network location (local or in cloud) and let the users to store documents there - so the documents would not be lost if some pc dies.
If PC dies, then you simply replace the pc and deploy ready to use system image.