Mac & PC Laptop Enterprise Backup System

[Zeheeba]

Hello everyone,

Does anyone have any experience with, or know of a software that can handle PC & Mac laptop backups in a enterprise environments? I’m hoping to find a single solution instead of setting up mobile home directories for PC’s and the magic triangle for the macs.

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards,
Daniel

[kennyj]

Check out CrashPlan… it can do unix, windows, and mac. The server can be various os’s, or it could also be run in a vm with the image they provide. CrashPlan offeres encryption and per-client deduplication. The biggest spend here will be disk space for everything. I’ve been testing it for our environment, and it looks pretty cool and simple.

[cloudmac]

Crashplan is a nice solution because it lets you “seed” backups to a local drive, and then move that data to the backup server. This way, the initial backup does not take a long time over the WAN.

I have also been using Atempo Time Navigator with great success for the past several years. Time Navigator supports Mac, Windows, Linux, etc… It is also nice because it has a Mac native interface. Their “Live Backup” product may be a nice fit for the PC users: http://bit.ly/tTf2n

“Atempo Live Backup gives end users the ability to recover their own files, while IT administrators can centrally manage all distributed data assets.”

I personally do not have experience with the Live Backup solution, but our servers have never lost data with Time Navigator. *knock wood* 😉

[blackandcode]

We have employed Crashplan <http://www11.crashplan.com/business/> at my organization with great success over the last several months. Backup and restore are pretty straightforward, and as mentioned by someone else, the ability to “seed” backups to a local location before backing up over WAN is pretty awesome. A neat thing about it too, is that it will back up in the background while a user is working, w/out the actual client app having to be open.

If you do end up using it, I recommend QOS’ing your network traffic to limit Crashplan to an acceptable bandwidth max so it doesn’t eat up your whole pipe with those potentially huge initial full backups – and if possible, set up a few backup servers/locations so you can sort of load balance…

Every single laptop in our company is “Crashplanned” and it has worked out pretty great.

…
[url]http://www.blackandcode.com[/url]

[macmanjc]

I am also looking into this for several clients after growing increasingly frustrated with Retrospect. CrashPlan looks very interesting, but I am concerned about its apparent lack of support for off-line storage of the backups. Perhaps I am overlooking something, but they specifically state on the website that they do not offer any sort of connectivity to any tape backup system. However, perhaps it is possible to move the CrashPlan data to an external hard drive and then store that drive off-site. Does anyone have any experience with such a setup? Or does anyone who is currently using CrashPlan have some alternate method of handling off-site storage?

Any information would be very helpful!
-John

[premiermac]

Generally for the offsite, the client has a “server” (can be any computer) setup at another location like a branch office or even the owner’s house, and backups are pushed there.

Another great way to do offsite with Crashplan Pro is to colo an iSCSI RAID unit and backup to it. Since the app encrypts the data prior to sending it, it’s safe across the wire.

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