simple backup solution

[dgall]

I rather new to MacOSX Server (installed it three weeks ago) because we needed a file server in the lab to centralize our users directories. This is a small workgroup of about 10 users. I’ve put all user directories on a the second HD of a MacPro and authentication is done through Open Directory. Everything works perfectly so far.

Having all the user directories on one disk, I clearly need a backup solution. As the amount of data is rather small, we don’t need something very sophisticated. I think that just copying the whole user directory to a third HD on the MacPro every night should be OK. Can somebody provide a simple solution to this problem ? (I guess it can be achieved through a command like cron)

[dgall]

mirroring the drive would use up resources, no ? I don’t need to have a mirror which is updated all the time. One single copy of the users directory every night would be fine. So basically what I am looking for is a simple way to issue a cp command every night at 3 am, to copy our /users to the 3rd hard disk and erasing the previous backup. Is psync/rsync the solution ? I am not familiar with these tools, could you provide a link to some documentation/examples (or are the man pages enough ?)

thanks

[TvE]

I am also on the way to begin using the “RAID-1 (mirror) with a third disk as backup” type of solution.

My idea is to “break” the mirror and take disk # 3 offsite for disaster recovery.
This solution sounds a lotbetter than a cp-cronjob.
I doubdt that it can be many ressources that are used to write (the same) data to one more disk – if that’s the case a faster server might be required anyways…

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