Apple MAC OS 10.4 Server backup program

Hi folks.

Was wondering if someone might be able to point me in the right direction.

I am looking for a backup program similar to your NT backups, Veritas for windows for a MAC server.

We currently have an XRAID which stores all of our pupils work and I want a program which can schedule backups everynight (I currently have to do this manually by copying the folders and dragging them onto the remote share).

I have had one suggested which is if I have a .mac account i can backup to a remote share, ideally i dont want to be worrying every year about renewing the account.

Does anyone suggest anything else?

Thanks

Retrospect (formerly by Dantz now by EMC) has been pretty much the lead for Mac backup software for many years, but a lot of large organisations will make use of rsync now to backup to disc before archive to tape.

Retrospect on OS X is slow, very slow, glacially slow.

It also has one of the least intuitive interfaces and media set options I have ever seen, and I've used 5 other different backup apps in recent years that were all better. Now the windows version might be fine, but the os x one isn't.

I'm using BRU at the moment, it has its share of issues too, but I am able to backup within a few hours now.

For comparison. 150GB on BRU takes around 2 1/2 hours. When I used retrospect it took around 20 hours.

Try bakbone's Netvault as a good heterogenous backup solution

http://www.bakbone.com and they've already certified Netvault backup for 10.5

Most of the major vendors support for backup on os x is pretty abysmal.
In particular support for os x server, which the likes of EMC, Veritas and IBM ignore completely in their enteprise products.

That's why companies turn to the smaller players such as Tolis BRU and Attempo's Time Navigator to backup their os x servers.

Not sure how good the backup exec client for os x is but wouldn't have thought it's very good.

Agree with retrospect, it's very basic, and has been superseded by much superior products despite it's early advantage.

You could always use scripts like robocopy to backup file and use a script to archive the OD.

Ross

Have just moved away from Retrospect after many years of often frustrating use, to BRU server which appears to do what it says on the tin without all the noodling about and cajoling that Retrospect always seemed to need. Also, it's a bit cheaper!

http://www.tolisgroup.com/products/bruserver/macosx/

An expensive but very very good piece of software to use is Archiware's PresStore. If you can afford it go for it.

We use it here at the college in conjunction with a 16 slot LTO-3 Superloader and it is truly fantastic. It has made my life so much easier!

We tested Netvault but did not rate it, and used to use the really quite dreadful retrospect.

Pete

Hi I ran a mac system for nearly 2 years and didn't get on with either of the backup solutions we tried. Retrospect was replaced by BRU, which was slighlt better. If you only have one server, have you considered a copy or disk image scheduled to run at night to a removable firewire disk? That's what I'm doing at the moment as server has been relocated just for music use. I have 2 drives and swap them over, taking one away for safe keeping.
Happy to be back in PC land

At the moment we currently backup our apple data to our SNAP server Nas box. Problem is the snap server is in the same location as the Apple server.

Now we have our media studio/office on the other side of the school and what I would like to do is on a daily basis for it to backup the data to the snap server but was thinking of installing a NAS box like bufallo on the other side of the building for the apple server to backup to this box on a weekend basis.

Rather than the school spending £500+ on a NAS box, is there any linux alternative that I could use which would allow me to backup the data on the linux box, if a student lost a file I could simply go to the linux box, locate the file and restore this back onto the apple server.

I have heard good feedback on free nas, would this work in a OSX environment? or does this work best for windows environments.

Thanks