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Dennis Wisnia
Asked: 2012-01-04 04:55:58 +0800 CST

Mac OS X Backups in Companies

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we have round about twenty Macbooks (mixed Snow Leopard and Lion) in our Company and thinking about a backup solution. Now we can buy a lot of time machines and make backups or we want a Storage System which is compatible with the time machine deamon.

Anyone have any experience with mac os backups in professional use?

backup linux lion

6 Answers

  1. Instead of backing up individual client machines (bad!), you should be doing a couple of things.

    1) Network home folders w/ offline cache enabled (OS X calls this a Mobile Account, I believe). This will alleviate the need to backup a bunch of individual client machines. You just back up the single server and all of their data will be there.

    2) Automated deployment solution. Something like ASR or Deploy Studio so that when a machine craps out, you can reimage it quickly and to a known configuration so that the users can be back up and running and accessing their network home folder immediately.

    The combination of these two things will both simplify your backup and make you more agile in the event of a client laptop failure.

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  2. Enterprise Backup software that supports Mac OS X exists. TSM comes to mind, which will install an agent on the end device and will then pull accordingly to TSM server. Also a central time machine server (running on Mac OS X Server) in front of your favorite storage.

    Another option is to provide central NFS (or even CIFS shares) with TM enabled on non AFP export/share via:

    defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

    Be ware that backing up mobile devices is hard, and questionable to do anyways!

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  3. Best Answer

    You can set up an OS X Lion server hooked up to a decent Promise or Active Storage Array. That will probably be your best bet for a 100% OS X Time Machine supported solution.

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  4. You could look into backuppc, or just use a smb backup with rsync.

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  5. Lion doesn't like SMB or NFS for time machine. Check if your Linux/Unix box has a recent version/package of Netatalk available, works like a charm for "network" time machine capsules.

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  6. Excluding the question of "why don't the users backup their data on the network," I have used the rsync option as someone has suggested, the other option is cpio. It copies the data and keeps the folder structure, creates a bash script and makes a cron job to run at X time and it will copy the appropriate contents to the appropriate places.

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