Subject: Re: [netatalk-admins] Mac backup solutions
From: Harry Zink (mail-atalk@fizbin.com)
Date: Fri Jun 05 1998 - 16:47:40 EDT
>Today my boss put me in charge of coming up with a robust, convenient,
>yet affordable backup solution for the nine Macs, and 6 NT/95 machines in
>our office.
Retrospect Remote is pretty much the ONLY effective solution for what you
are looking at.
Yes, you need to run it from a central Mac, from where you administer the
backups, but Retrospect has far too many advantages for the task you
listed. I'd love there to be a Linux/netatalk based solution, but none
are transparent enough.
>I was thinking I could hook up the tape drive to the Linux box,
> share it via Netatalk, then backup to it using Retrospect. Retrospect
>does full NT and Win95 backups as well.
*WAY* too complicated, and you will be suffering a performance loss.
Don't even know how you wouuld be shariung the tape drive, unless you
share it as a volume you write to. When you have the drive hoked up to
the machine running Retrospect, Retro uses it's own native way to access
the drive, which will yield far better throughput than going over the
network twice.
Once retrieving the data from your server, or clients, then sending it
over the network to the tape drive.
Not very efficient.
The other option you have is having your clients save the data they want
to backup to folders on the netatalk machine - but that depends on
clients actually religiously backing up. Since you are in charge, the
last thing you need is some user NOT backiung up their local machine,
losing the drive, and then blaming you for not having an effective backup
solution.
Besides, you'd be having the redundnat network travel of your data.
I think it's good to find effective ways to integrate netatalk into
office environments, but don't juggle with something as crucial as backup
of data.
Harry
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