Backing up Mac clients to a network location?

[DanJ_LRSFC]

What do people here use to back up client Macs over the network?

We tried Time Machine first, as we figured that would be the "de facto standard" for Mac backup. However it required a Mac server, and we also found that clients that we set up to use it could then no longer accept USB sticks / USB hard drives. So that was no good.

We're currently using Retrospect, which seems to be the only Mac capable backup software which doesn't use Time Machine as a backend. This allows us to have a Windows server on some proper hardware with a 10GbE ethernet adaptor and a beefy amount of hard drive space. However in operation it's rather quirky. For example, if we want to have one big backup set (in order to take advantage of the deduplication) then it can only back up one Mac at a time, which is not great. Also, we've had several instances where something has gone wrong and we have had to rebuild the catalog file, which is a lengthy operation during which no backups can be done.

Is there something better than either Time Machine or Retrospect?

• Needs to be able to have a server app that runs on Windows (or Linux, I suppose, but Windows is probably preferable for ease of management) so we can run it on proper server hardware
• Needs to support deduplication (2018 EDIT: Windows Server can now do deduplication so this is no longer essential)
• Ideally, we'd like to be able to back up several Macs at once. The hardware we have should be capable of it
• Client app needs to be compatible with 10.8, 10.9 and 10.10 (we're trying to get all of our clients moved to 10.10 but without the ability to back them up it is difficult - student work needs to be backed up before we can reimage a Mac that's on the older versions)
• Client app needs to be compatible with OS X 10.11 and macOS 10.12
• EDIT: Needs to be on-premise, due to the amounts of data we'd be working with and also data protection issues, we wouldn't want these backups going over the Internet
• EDIT: Needs to be licensed per-device rather than per user, as we have far fewer Macs than we have users. Or ideally (like Retrospect) we just want a server license that covers unlimited clients

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Dan Jackson (Lead ITServices Technician)
Long Road Sixth Form College
Cambridge, UK.

[stevewood]

Crash Plan PRO from Code42: CrashPlan

Server runs on Mac, Windows or Linux. You can deploy easily enough with Casper. There are a few white papers and plenty of discussions here about it.

[DanJ_LRSFC]

I thought CrashPlan was cloud based? I should probably have specified in my original post that due to the size of the data we're dealing with, and also data protection issues, we need an entirely on-premise solution. EDIT: and we also need per-device licensing, not per user, as we have far fewer Macs than we have users.

[rtrouton]

CrashPlan Pro has the options of being entirely cloud-based, using an on-premise backup server, or a mix of both:

http://www.code42.com/deployment-options/

[mpermann]

@DanJ_LRSFC CrashPlan is available as on-premise as well. We looked at it, but it was more costly than the organization was willing to pay. I am not sure if the licensing is per device or per user. We ended up purchasing external hard drives to give to staff to use with Time Machine.

[DanJ_LRSFC]

@mpermann yes I just looked at their pricing and it is per-user which would definitely be too expensive for us.

[mpermann]

@DanJ_LRSFC I think you're going to have a hard time finding an on-premise deduplication backup product that is inexpensive. If you do find something, post back. I'd be interested in what you found.

[stevewood]

And being education, I would reach out to Code42 to see if they might have an EDU discount of some sort available. I do know they price break at different levels of users, but I do not recall what those levels are.

I love CrashPlan and it's simplicity to setup and use, along with the fact that as long as my private cloud is available via the internet, my users are being backed up anywhere they are: at home, at Starbucks, wherever.

[chad_fox]

Using a 2012 R2 VM with Aconis.

Works great and you're able to backup multiple machines at a time.

[DanJ_LRSFC]

@mpermann well, Retrospect is inexpensive and does do the deduplication, but as mentioned it has a lot of quirks.

@chad.fox I don't see an Acronis product that supports Mac clients? We don't want to create images of the whole Mac, just back up the area where Media Department students are doing their video work (multi-gigabyte files).

[DanJ_LRSFC]

Just bumping this old thread, we're still using Retrospect but even in version 15.1 it's still just as quirky as it ever was, so we could still do with a better solution.

[davidacland]

Acronis do have a backup agent for Mac that works well. Backup server can be cloud (with Acronis) or on your own hardware.

I'd go for Crashplan though if a simple solution is needed.

[ASoesmanjn]

Using Acronis Backup here, all been good to date, both backups and restores working great.

Mohave security has broken the silent deployment, now prompting on install and so far PPPC profiles aren't fixing it.