Portable Home Directories and Backup

[sky]

The User Management documentation for 10.4 Server states that Portable Home Directories should not be used instead of backups… I would like to open a discussion on this.

Assume as an administrator, I designate all content within the user’s Home directory to be synchronized. Is there a problem with using portable home directories to sync Home with the server, then backup the contents of the server, rather than backing up the contents of each laptop Home directory?

The two points made by Apple are:
* it synchronizes only new and changed files.
* you can not retrieve older versions.

My scenario is that these users would log into the Server network, on occasion, and sync when they wanted to backup. Assuming you have several different backup sets, it would be possible to recover older versions of Home data.

Additionally, these users may be disconnected from the network for extended periods of time — has anyone encountered authentication issues where a mobile user is locked out of their machine because they are ‘off the grid’?

[Anonymous]

I know this an old post.

In my opinion, it is fine to use PHD’s and backup the fileserver. Most desktop and mobile users don’t want to manage their backups – that’s why we have IT support staff and helpdesk folks.

If you are using PHD’s, focusing your backup strategy on the fileserver is absolutely going to work. The only benefit you’d have to backup workstations and the server is super-mega-happy-redunancy instead of merely perfectly adequete redundancy.

Disclaimer: I am not running OS X Server nor PHD in an enterprise environment. What I can say is that our corporate IT staff in my organization doesn’t do any backups of workstations at all. The only recovery options you have, ever, is when you store things on the fileserver. That is backed up, nothing else is, and you’re screwed if you’re not keeping everything on the wicked-slow fileserver.

Doing it with PHD’s not only makes it easier for the users but the administrators as well – you don’t have to grit your teeth and tell a user you can’t recover their Documents because they never copied them to the “right drive”.

[szumlins]

Our policy has always been that if it isn’t on the server (group shares), tough luck. Turning on PHD just gives me the added benefit of maybe making someone happier when their drive dies or they have some other hardware failure.

I generally don’t back up the PHD’s on the server. They live on a RAID 5 partition. It just doesn’t seem to make sense to backup up an additional 20-30 gigs (depending on the user, some don’t have anything and work totally off the server) for work that generally is not production.

So I guess to answer your question, I wouldn’t trust it as a true backup mechanism, but it is a great way to add value to your users’ environment.

[Author]

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