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Question

Backup - some suggestions requested

  • May 4, 2010
  • 2 replies
  • 23 views
K
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Hi,

In our environment the Macs play second fiddle to Windows and Unix. Currently we are using a combination of Symantec PureDisk and NetBackup to
backup Unix and Windows servers. PureDisk does not work so well on the Mac
platform in my testing... I'm working on testing NetBackup 7 currently. We
have been using Bakbone NetVault and Replicator for our Apple environment
with poor results.

Our small number of Mac servers houses a very large amount of data. These
servers are at different locations around US and Canada. I'd like something
that I could centrally manage and may be able to synchronize backups to our
central facility. I also have a few very old servers that I need to shoot
in the head and replace... some are running old versions of Retrospect which
I'm not very familiar with.

What backup solution do you use for your Macintosh servers, and why do (or
don't) you like it? What would you recommend using in an environment with
large data stores (8TB and up)?

Thanks,
Ken

    2 replies

    K
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    • Kedgar
    • Author
    • Contributor
    • May 4, 2010

    Hi Gene,

    I typed this quickly and failed to mention that I was trying out CrashPlan. It seems to never finish scanning, then it does another FS scan and I never
    get a full backup of about a 4TB volume. Granted there may be some file
    system issues here that I'm looking at as well.

    A
    • Anonymous
    • May 5, 2010

    We use IBM’s Tivoli for PC and Mac. I hate it, hate it, hate it. Did I mention I hate it?

    It doesn’t work very well on the Mac’s from my experience. It works like a champ for Windows boxes but does all kinds of quirky crap on the Mac side. It takes 5x longer to backup the same amount of Mac data as it does PC data. The algorithm that’s used must only be optimized for Windows. If you change permissions on a Windows file it does some magic where it will just change the permission on the backup file but if you change permissions on a Mac file it needs to back up the entire file. It’s fun to propagate permissions on 2Tb of data and then watch it take a whole day to re-backup every single file.

    I will say that I have had 1 person tell me that Tivoli works well for them on the Macs. I would bet that it’s cost prohibitive for a lot of environments.

    This topic comes up a lot on the OS X Admin listserv. You might try searching the archives for that mailing list.

    - JD

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