Had a customer that got hit with a Tornado this week. Took out their Windows server and the linux backup server. They had not been rotating drives in backup server. I told them the server backup rsynced to my Rocky server at 8PM. I started samba on my server mounted their file system from the backups on a to a virtual drive, and read only shared them on my virtual Windows machine. I remoted into their laptops and built a VPN to my network and made shortcuts to the shares. This took 20 minutes. They were able to find there critical files and copy them to their desktop and get the accounting and payroll done.
I have now restored their entire Windows server to a virtual machine on my Rocky server and they will use the VPN to be in business from home while they try to repair the damage to the building and get a new server. They are a medical records company, so everyone has a laptop and can/does work from home.
This recovery plan costs them $29 a month. Once I set it up I rarely have to do anything. Linux servers just work day in and day out. I love it when recovery plans come together. Linux is the way to backup up Windows computers. This is all done with Rocky Linux 8.9 servers. They backup to a local server samba share. I have scripts to copy the files to an external drive weekly and rsync a current backup nightly to my server. I use rsync which is secure SSH and I do it where I have to have specific key on the remote side to allow SSH. I uses old Dell 10+ year old computers that I got for free, a bunch of 4TB drives in a software RAID, and a small program called Drive Snapshot. Drive Snapshot is a single 1MB exe file. It encrypts all the backups with 256 Bit encryption as well. I developed all the scripts and bat files that do the backups and tells me in a email each night if they all went ok. It is a perfect use of Linux to support disaster recovery for businesses that use Windows.