I have a Mini running Snow Leopard Server. I have a firewire 800 drive hooked up to the Mini that has all the documents for my business. I want to do a daily off-site backup of all the files on that drive.
Any suggestions? I'm brand new to macs and servers, so please dumb it down for me if possible.
Brian
First off set up Time Machine on it's own external drive. This is not "off site" but is a good first level of defence.
How to do an off site backup depends on (1) how much data you have and (2) how fast that data changes, or how much new data you generate per day. But most peple don't have so much data.
A simple plan is to buy a few external drives and rotate them to an off site location. Three drives is a good number to have. These drives and your Time Machine drive all need to be about twice as large as the total amount of data you expect to have over the three year life of the drive. Any backup software that is __incremental__ will work. do not attempt to "clone" youre data as a backup method
The simplest method is to simply rotate you Time machne drives. turn off TM swap the drive turn it back on and let it re-sync then take the un-plgged drive to some safe place.
I like "Retrospect" but Apple's "backup" works too and so does rotating the TM drive.
The basic rules of thumb is to always have at least three copies of the dat at two physical locations. And "always" means ever durring the backup process.
If you have three drives you use in rotaion, replace one of them every year
