Off-site backup of documents on Snow Leopard Server

[Brian Blum]

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

 

[Les Kern]

I have played with with a few things, and currently use "Backup" by Apple, but you need a Mobile Me account. Works great. There's Cabonite at 55 bucks a year for unlimited storage, and I hear it's great. If off-site is not absolutely required, there are a dozen or more local solutions. I rely on Retrospect, and it has never failed me. Of course there are a million manual ways to do it...

 

[trainguy77]

If off-site is not absolutely required, there are a dozen or more local solutions. I rely on Retrospect, and it has never failed me. Of course there are a million manual ways to do it...

Off site is a must have for any company.

 

[nitrobackup]

How much data are you talking about?

 

[ChrisA]

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

 

[dazey]

To do my offsite I have an old G4 mini at work that runs cronosync that connects via vpn to my main home server and syncs up. I sync a 800GB drive this way (although it only has about 500GB of data currently)