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All,



I wanted to get a post going here to weigh in on what other organizations are using for Mac Backup solutions.
Most Mac friendly environments encourage time machine, and I personally don't mind it.



However, due to the nature of my company, cloud based solutions aren't "acceptable". We do not run Mac servers as a whole either, but hope to get some out eventually to help with our quickly Mac growing environments.



I worked with retrospect before but noticed that they have changed their dynamic to requiring a server based app running. I remembered and tested in the past a client which allowed back up to SMB (windows share) mount which would have been great in our environment.



That being said, I have not ruled our Rsync routines pushed through jamf Self Service as a alternative (or even standalone scripts for our end users).



Not sure if anyone else in the community may work under similar circumstance and have a good recommended 3rd party backup solution. Looking at something easy to configure on our Macs, allow the user to mount a SMB share (off of windows files server/NAS) and backup straight to it. Also, have some GUI friendly configurations for the end users as well.



Appreciate any input.



Thanks



one Item I forgot to mention. no cloning.



Our organization is big on this (across all OS systems).



Just backup of files from their location to share. Full, incremental, versions, etc.



Thanks

@Kallendal have a look at Arq Backup. You can backup to file share or NAS locations in addition to lots of cloud locations. They have a Mac and Windows version which may be a plus for you. The product has de-duplication and lots of other features.
It's also reasonably priced. I use it at home on my Macs and it works pretty well.

Free file sync is pretty sweet lots of customization (And free open source)

If you or your boss has the money to burn you could look at enterprise software such as Druva or IMB Tivoli storage manager which is all server side configured and all you do is pretty much deploy the client and walk away...



This is a great investment as you will save costs of using data recovery services which are stupidly over priced and your time as boots on the ground trying to tell someone there disk has failed.



alot of options tech wise out there anyways man!

I know that commerical solutions are technically better than Time Machine, but still:
Did you notice that since 10.12 TimeMachine officially supports using SMB shares as backup destination? (before 10.12 you could tweak the OS with defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1, but that is unsuported)
Users must mount the smb sharepoint, and then enable TimeMachine Backup.
see PH25585: macOS Sierra: Disks you can use with Time Machine

Is there a way to only use Time Machine on network drives?

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