Backup advice

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1

I would like to bolster our company’s backup practices. Any advice for hardware/software would be appreciated, and especially if anyone has seen anything that resembles hardware described below.

Right now, we have a pretty loose policy of backing up key folders to an external drive that is ultimately stored off-site. This is fine, but requires me to actually find the time and gumption. Not to mention then having to bring the drive to work, go to each machine, fire up the backup software and wait for that to finish copying. This happens, at best once a week, and at worst once a month.

Here is my ideal solution:

Basically an NAS box, with a cradle for a removable drive.

So the NAS box handles a ‘local’ backup (printer sharing, and media streaming if so equipped) , while the cradle allows for me to walk into the studio with a portable hardrive in hand. Drop the drive into the cradle, and the portable drive is sync’d up with the ‘local’ backup from the NAS.

So the data is now in three places: 1) each users’ machine, 2) the NAS and 3) the portable drive that is taken off-site. The cradled drive should not need to do a complete rebuild each time it is dropped in, but rather an incremental update and then kept current for the time it is in the cradle.

I would like a backup schema that is more like TimeMachine, in the sense that it maintains a history of the file and does not simply mirror the users’ machines. I want to avoid the user-error problem of accidental file deletion. The network is mixed, PCs and Macs.

This arrangement would better fit my life-style of entering the office; hang-up my coat, deposit my satchel next to my desk, sit down and turn-on my machine. I could easily fit ‘drop hdd in cradle’ between ‘hang-up coat’ and ‘sit down’.

If I were real paranoid, I could alternate between the external drives and they would each be kept up-to date independently (yes, that would make it 4 copies of the data).

Thanks

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2

I have been using Restrospect for years and it does a good job backing up a rack of servers to a DLT tape drive, although I don’t have the latest version since the newest OSX on the servers is 10.3. I have heard that there are issues with it not backing up certain kinds of OSX system files, but since what you want to backup is content files this isn’t an issue. I also have one of the servers set to backup to portable hardrives which works well.

Regarding the NAS, assuming that this is a single drive NAS then what you describe would work. However, if it is a raided NAS it’s more problematic depending on the raid level of the NAS. If it is mirrored, then you would have a minimum of 2 drives and removing one is feasible since they are both the same, if it is striped then the data is spreading across 2 or more drives. This would mean taking home the raid and not just a single drive.

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