network homedirectory backup setup questions

[Anonymous]

Hi!

I’m looking for the easiest/best way to organise my backup setup, and was hoping someone here has already invented the wheel for me

Setup en info:
Design studio with about 15 users, working with lots of big files all transfered over a Gb network. Everyone uses a network home directory.
MacOS X Server 10.3.9 on a G4 dual processor Mac with an external SATA case.
I use Softraid for the mirroring.
2x mirrored 250 Gb production drive
2x mirrored 200 Gb network home directory drive
2x mirrored 35 Gb drive for our administration database.

On our current OS 9 server I always backed everything up over the network at night with retrospect to an AIT tape drive, using a new tape every day for two weeks and then reusing those.
Budget is low, so I want to backup to external 250 Gb firewire drives now, again rotating 10 of those for two weeks before reusing them.

Problem is that when trying to backup to the firewire drive over the network with Retrospect 6 all my permissions are changed thus redering my backup a lot less useful. Not a big problem for the production drive since everyone got the same privileges for most of the files, and the ones with read only permissions are easy to correct in case disaster strikes, but what would be the best way to backup the homedirectories in a way I could quickly copy them back if the homedirectory HD’s on the server die?
One option I thought of would be to use softraid to mirror them to an external drive every night, but that would be less practical since I’m not always there to start the backup and I don’t want everyone to start messing with softraid on the running server …
Could I use something like RSync to copy the homedirectory data to another computer on the network or are there easier/better ways to do this?

Any tips or idea’s are appreciated!

Thanks,
Haiko.

[MDhaliwal]

I was faced with a similar situation months ago. I was in the process of getting a new backup and disaster recovery plan designed, but needed a quick, reliable way to backup user data.

What’d I do? I grabbed a few 1TB LaCie FireWire 800 drives! Ok, so it won’t win any awards for being revolutionary, but using Carbon Copy Cloner to replicate user data over FireWire 800 was fast, convenient and easy to do. You can even schedule the jobs to run, giving you a nice level of automation, in case someone forgets to kick off the task, or such.

I was easily backing up 1TB of data overnight in my environment, without running into live hours.

Hope this helps!

[Anonymous]

Seems like the easiest way to do it. Found a way to do it with cronnix and ditto, so gonna try that for a while. Don’t like the fact that I have to connect and disconnect a firewire-drive from and to the server every day, but so be it for now. (I want to use multiple drives for the backup so I can go back a week in backups.)

Thnx for the advice.

[Author]

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