Home Backup Advice

[dagza]

Hello,

 

I am looking to backup photos, itunes, movies and the like from 2 macs at home (1 leopard and 1 tiger). I also want to to backup a couple of vista laptops whilst I am on. 500 gig should do it but 1tb would obviously be better.

 

I am currently favouring getting another disk for the mac mini but would like some software on the macs and windows machine to make it all effortless.

 

Can anyone recommend a solution?

 

Thanks

[GrumbleDook]

Normally I would say that Time Machine is the best bet for starting with backup for the Mac, but I use a variety of options. I have Time Machine to a locally attached Drive and then use Backup to perform a weekly archive to me NAS.

 

On the PC side of things I still use NTBackup on XP and 2003, but I am still looking for something decent on Vista.

 

I have looked at EMC Retrospect as I used to use it when it was Dantz, but didn't want to cough up the cash at this time. Now Retrospect for Mac 8 is out I might look again.

[CyberNerd]

I currently use rsync scripts to back up windows and linux computers.

Theres a howto for macs here HOWTO Backup Your Mac With rsync

 

rsync will run over a network (secure over ssh) or simple disk to disk

[dagza]

Excellent, thanks for all of them. I shall investigate them all.

 

Does Time Machine backup to a normal shared drive on a mac over wireless? Reading Around apple are a little vague about this. Presumably because they want you to get a Time Capsule.

[ninja-lewis]

I don't think Time Machine supports backups to any shares other than Time Capsules - I remember finding no answer last year anyway.

 

What about a HP Mediasmart server though? HP have announced new models that will support Mac backups. WHS will manage nightly backups of the vista laptops with minimal hassle and you can add more storage as necessary. Probably more than you wish to spend though.

[GrumbleDook]

TimeMachine has to backup to HFS+ formated drives. This is where it falls down for me and so I only use it in a similar way people would use volume shadow copy, quick access to a differential backup based over a time period.

 

TimeCapsule is Apple's option on this but apparently you can do it to other HFS+ shares on other Macs. Ross may have more info on this.

[kingswood]

You can have TM backup to an HFS+ partition *just about* anywhere. EVen making an HFS+ partition on a Windows box with Partition Magic or similar tool can do it. I haven't tried this yet but it looks interesting:

 

HowTo: Make Ubuntu A Perfect Mac File Server And Time Machine Volume [update6] › Blog › kremalicious.com Matthias Kretschmann | Photography & Design

 

Of course with backups I personally think that KISS is the best option: "Keep it Simple Sir". So, just get an external hard drive, format it appropriately and use it for Time Machine (which has matured quite a lot since the initial release of Leopard). I have managed to use TM over wireless, but I'm not sure outside of Time Capsule Apple would support this? I may be wrong here!!!

 

Because you want to integrate your backups (so backing up from both Windows and Macs to a single HDD) you could just partition the external disk and be done with it. KISS. As someone suggested though you could go the Mediasmart server route?

 

HTH some,

 

Paul