Xserve Raid Physical Backup?

[Kyron]

I work for a Small to Medium business. We currently have an Mac XServer 10.3.9 OS and a XServe Raid storage unit. This unit hold all our creative data.
(Its a graphic artist department)

I have looked for a good program to Backup our server, the thing is our backup drive is currently a external 1TB HardDrive and our file data exeeds that amount (its around 1.5).

So my question is this... Is there a backup program that I can use to choose what folders in my server I want to back up? Free or Paid doesn't matter, just as long as it works.

Please and Thank You.

 

[steve.harman]

Have you tried using Time Machine? It's really a powerful little program. It will let you do everything that you are asking about. Plus it's part of the OS

 

[Kyron]

Steve,

Thank you for the response. I will look into that.
Do you or any one else out there in the forum community know of any other programs?

 

[VoR]

rsync

 

[ChrisA]

Steve,

Thank you for the response. I will look into that.
Do you or any one else out there in the forum community know of any other programs?

Of course there is always "dump". It has been the standard backup program used by Unix-like systems for over 20 years. It is very common to run a dump script out of a cron tab. You can read all about dump by typeing "man dump" i the terminal. try "man cron" too. Both of these ship with Mac OS X so you already have them

Then there is EMC's "retrospect". It works as well as "dump/cron" but offers a point and click interface.
http://www.emcinsignia.com/products/software/retroformac/comparison/

Apple's Time machine works well but with as much data as you have you will need another RAID unit to act as the TM drive. Drobo might work for this.

In any case you really, really, need to have multiple backups with at least one of the backup sets stored off-site. All of the above options allow for off-site.

You want me to recommend something? OK I'll do it anyways...
Give a Drobo RAID. Fill it with four 1TB drives and let Time Machine have this entire unit. Turn it on and leave it alone. Then, on top of this install Retrospect. Set up three backups sets with your most impotent data and buy three external drives. Periodically copy a backup set to one of the drives then take that drive home with you and bring the one at home back to work and rotate the three sets that way. Every year replace on e the three backup drives with the largest one you an find. That way none of the drives will every be more then 3 years old.

Buy a fire safe for you house and offece. Keep the backups in there.

 

[mikedavis]

BRU will do what you want. we use it and its works great.

http://www.tolisgroup.com/

that said, you'll need to check on compatibility with your version of server, you may need to update to something newer that 10.3.9

-m

 

[Kyron]

Love these forums.
You guys are great. Thanks for the advice and suggestions.
I'm looking into all of them.

 

[Dunepilot]

Chronosync

Chronosync is well worth a look too.

 

[Dunepilot]

Have you tried using Time Machine? It's really a powerful little program. It will let you do everything that you are asking about. Plus it's part of the OS

I'd avoid Time Machine for anything that important (a whole department's files) as you can't actually look at the backup it's done and know that it's not corrupt. I've seen situations where Time Machine has gone off the reservation and people haven't thought to ever test out the restore. Not a fun situation to find yourself in.

 

[Kyron]

Has anyone heard of SuperDuper?
It seems to be a cheap but good backup app.
Any thoughts on this one?

 

[Kyron]

Hey all. First I want to say thank you for all the help.

My company and myself decided to go with Retrospective 6.1
So far so good.

I hope this forum will be helpful to others.

 

[NewspaperITGuy]

Just about to say...

Cool that you went with Retrospective; I was going to suggest it. We used to use that on our old Panther server. We now have an Xserve 10.4.11 and we use an Overland Storage Device (tape library) to perform our daily backups.

Cheers!

 

[gabeoravitz]

superduper

superduper for sure. it's amazing.