Questions[time-machine](server)

A significant portion of the users in our company use Macs, mostly MacBook Pros with a few iMacs and Airs thrown in for good measure. We're running a mixture of 10.6 and 10.7. So far we've been providing USB drives to each employee for use as a Time Machine backup, but that's becoming fairly cumbersome.

After searching around, I'm pretty confident we can centralize this with NAS (QNAP, Drobo, etc.) or a Mac Server running on either a Mini or a Pro. From what I have read, the newer firmware for QNAP (and others) can handle the Netatalk changes that went out with OS 10.7. And obviously Mac Server 10.7 plays nicely with everyone.

The problem is that I can't figure out what kind of system I need to support our employees. I'm certain Time Machine is heavy on disk I/O, but does that mean I should treat it like a database server? e.g. increase my spindle count? Is memory or CPU a constraint at all? Or is it strictly network and disk I/O?

More simply: can one Mac Mini running Server 10.7 handle 12 users performing Time Machine backups? Or can a single Drobo B800fs handle the load? What about a QNAP TS-459U+? Or do I need something beefier?

I guess I'd love to see some information about resource utilization in general. First hand knowledge such as "I'm using a Mac Pro w/8GB RAM and 4x disk RAID-10 array to support 20 people" would be immensely beneficial.

Any advice would be appreciated.

I've a linux VPS hosted in a VPS datacenter.

I need to implement backup on it. I'll order The Planet's Stored Cloud to do this. http://www.theplanet.com/cloud-storage/

My question is about the Backup Strategy:

Today I have other servers and I use a rsync backup by week. I get a full backup at the beginning of week, and increment this along the week.

In the backup server I've something like it:

200902_week06

200902_week07

200902_week08

....

By week, I'm using rsync --delete. It's working for my proposes until now.

But in this new server, I've a lot of files, and copy and recopy it all weeks will lost bandwidth and storage size.

I this old way, I can rollback files if something goes wrong just by week. In this new case I need to rollback files by day.

I'm thinking something like Time Machine on mac: I send just what is new, like rsync, but I can rollback (and travel to) each committed day.

To do this, I'm thinking to use a VCS, like Bazaar, to manage the commit entries. What do you think about this?

The second question about this strategy is to use a second backup storage: The Backup from Backup. I know data-centers like The Planet have RAID. But what happens if someone get access on my VPS and get the user and password from backup service stored on my CRON's backup script?

In my actually way, I'm doing two backups, and in my public server there isn't mention about the second storage. Again: what do you think about this? There are other ways?

Thank you, Daniel Koch

Sometimes OS X tells me that it's "Preparing backup..." for an enormous amount of time. The time it takes seems to have no correlation to the amount of data to be backed up. Same for the "Finishing backup..." stage.

The question: what is OS X doing when it's "Preparing backup..." and "Finishing backup..."?

I know it's figuring out what to backup and then recording the changes, but surely the time this takes should be proportional to the amount of data that changed. There's plenty of space disk space (so I assume it's not deleting old backups). I'm using a TimeCapsule if that makes any difference. Nothing is going wrong with it, I'm just curious.

How can I make backup from iPhoto without time machine?

I've got a huge server (running Ubuntu Linux) which has got a 2TB raid sitting there just begging for me to backup to it.

I run netatalk to enable sharing via the AFP protocol to my Macs (all my client boxes are Macs pretty much) and had setup timemachine to use a shared drive on the server as it's destination.

Only trouble is it seems to be completely unreliable. I reguarly get problems where TimeMachine cannot finish the backup for one reason or another, and sometimes it seems to bring the whole server down (I know its a software rather than a hardware issue because the server is actually Ubuntu running under KVM and the KVM host is always still running).

So the question is has anyone had any success trying to do this? Does anyone know of any issues? Is there a better way to go about this? I know its a little vague but I was wondering if other users had experiences to share.