Time Machine backup options

Rollo Tamasi

Evenin'
We have five Macs in work and our IT guy is getting around to put a procedure in place in order to have the Mac drives backed up. He is investigating the options available but I would like to hear what the options are for backing up using Time Machine.

One of the options open to us is to use Time Capsule. This looks like a nice bit of kit but I presume there are cheaper alternatives than the Apple endorsed hardware. Are there any wireless external HDs out there worth their salt?

Another option is to back up to one of the shared drives on a Windows 2003 server. However, one of the guys in work said that there could be problems backing up documents from OS X to Windows because of compatibilities with DS Store and the localized files. I'm not sure if there is an truth in his thinking though.

What other backup means are available to us? We all use Leopard. We all connect to the network via cable.

babypink

A)you mightn't need to use time capsule at all.......just have a disk shared over the network and time machine should (if you want to use time machine) correctly identify the disk and use it.....it should also look after managing multiple machines onto a single backup disk.

here's how you go about doing it...

http://www.imulus.net/george/software/using-leopard-time-machine-to-backup-of-a-network/

Last thing - it seems that you need to mount the network share each time you boot, but make the share a startup item and it should be all automatic.

This should* work.

*bp takes no responsibility if it doesn't work - as it is a hack and i've heard issues with 10.5.2

Use Superduper for super easy scheduled cloning & smart updating to network drives!

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

Type 17

It might (or might not) help you to know that I have an iMac and a MacBook, both on 10.5.2, back up using Time Machine to an External Hard Drive (500 GB Western Digital) on an Airport Extreme Base Station (Fast Ethernet model).

If you already own an AEBS or a suitably big External Drive, it might suit you to not have to buy a Time Capsule...

There is no trouble with more than one machine backing up at the same time, apart from filling up the drive a bit sooner.

Rollo Tamasi

Thanks for the replies guys.
What do you think about the claim of the Mac backups having compatibility issues with windows server 2003?

babypink

i believe it's not so much windows server in particular, as windows/SMB drives. Time machine wants to use HFS drives, i suspect that Type 17's drive is formatted HFS and thats why its working super-easy for him as an external wireless drive.

The time machine hack, above, enables SMB(networked windows drives) drives for Time machine. As for the .DS_store issue......with time machine it's a moot point because it creates its own image on the drive and works from that, rather than directly copying from directory to directory.

Ditto for superduper, it will create images of the drives you wish to back up and work on those.

Both options above should preserve all metadata corresponding to the files, leaving you with no problems.

Type 17

babypink wrote: »

...I suspect that Type 17's drive is formatted HFS and thats why its working super-easy for him as an external wireless drive.

In fairness, I (re)formatted it to start using it for Time Machine through the AEBS, and the recommendation was "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" (HFS), so that's what I went for. It had been used for TM as a standard external drive on USB for my iMac only, but I had trouble getting it working without a reformat, so I had to dump the old backups in the reformat - it took 4 days to back up the 232 GB again...