Whats your Business backups like?

[zOdeac]

Looking for peoples ideas before i implement this.

We have many systems 12 Mac systems and 8 windows systems. We got a Synology NAS unit DS411+II.

In the backup we want to make sure there secure from others so this is what I'm thinking.

Create separate accounts for each person on the NAS so that time machine rights only to that persons profile and no one but them has access. during that night our NAS will copy all data off to a 3TB hard drive witch we will exchange
with another 3TB drive Daily until the day we think we should do online backups but for now we have this hardware.

The other option we have is take a Lion Server and have all Time Machine backups pointed to that and have the Server put all the data on the NAS.

Them are my ideas please give your ideas we want to do this right the first time.

Thanks

 

[DustinT]

How critical is the data you are backing up?

Time Machine is a good option, especially if you take that data offsite and check the integrity of the TM backups often. If you have some database failure in TM you can risk data loss. Of course, thats possible with anything you might use. So, just check, recheck and check again to make sure your backups are actually working.

Taking the 3tb drives offsite is a great approach. I'd recommend you invest in a few more, personally. I like to have at least 3 drives in rotation. That way you've got more leeway in case of data corruption, either accidental or malicious.

 

[sshefer]

Here's how we manage about 12 Mac and 8 Windows Machines.

OS X Server with basic file sharing, time machine, and mobile accounts. Everything (but the OS) is stored on an external drive hooked up to our Mac Mini in a RAID enclosure via FW800. The Mac Mini itself is setup in a RAID array for the OS.

We back everything up nightly with SuperDuper and clone both the OS drive and the file drive. We also run CrashPlan Pro to backup the file drive in the background. CrashPlan Pro is slow and we used to run Arq with S3 but for 8 bucks a month we get unlimited data storage, file versioning, and it keeps deleted files. If we need any deleted files or older versions I go there to pull them.

Crude but it works - in the future we may switch to a Drobo.

 

[derbothaus]

Xserve's running 10.5.8 to LTO5 via fibre and the terrible, horrible Retrospect 6.
Storage are Promise VTRAK's, again, via 4Gb fibre. Works OK. Looking into other software and have been for 3 years