Mac Backups

[Brotato]

Hi CP,

I thought I would ask you all about how you backup your/spouse's mac backup regement.

I have my wife's macbook backing up to a timemachine server on my NAS, which I also backup my PC to. However, I also backup my critical files (My Docs / Pictures) to Amazon's S3 in addition to the NAS. My thought pattern for my PC was "If I lose an HDD, I have a backup in the basement. If the house goes up in smoke, I have a backup on the CLOOOUUUUUUUUUD".

However I recently realized that irreplacable baby pics are on my wife's macbook. While I am okay if her disk craters with the timemachine backup on the NAS, I am up crap creek if the house burns down.

I thought I would just add a network drive to my PC for the timemachine server on the NAS and add that to my S3 upload, but I can't see it on my PC, nor can I even find out where it's store in UNIX-land on the NAS.

So what I think I want to do, poor man style, is find a piece of (hopefully free) software that would run on my wife's macbook and backup her mac stuff to either my PC or a findable folder on the NAS, which I could then add to my S3 upload rotation...

What are the rest of you doing for offsite macbackups?

[keratosis]

Eat 3 or 4...
Ohhhhh...
Apple Mac.
n/m

[Rathji]

For a PC I would use something like Synctoy, which is essentially a GUI wrapper for Robocopy.

I just googled and it seems like there are some options available. Check out Mac (OS X) SyncToy alternatives. I have no experience with any of those products, so do some other research before randomly downloading software to your computer.

If you want a more robust option, with email alerts of something has gone wrong, etc, I use Crashplan for rmy backup needs. If you don't backup to their servers it is free, even if you backup to another computer (off-site or on your local network). Then just include the crashplan folder in your other archive.

[sclitheroe]

You could find something for the Mac, or you could write a script and schedule it on her machine, etc. But there's a problem with this approach - it's her machine, and that means you'll need to keep tabs on whether its running correctly, that she hasn't accidentally disabled it, etc.

So instead, I'd think outside the box and turn the process around. Turn on File Sharing on her Mac with the windows compatibility, and share out her home folder. Then, on your PC, you can write a small script that maps a drive to her home folder share, and uses robocopy to do a mirror copy of her home folder to a directory on the NAS. Schedule that to run hourly at night or something, and you'll have an almost-real-time copy of her hard drive. Since the NAS backs up to S3, you'll end up with a current copy in the cloud as well.

This is analogous to what we do in the server world - we never, ever, rely on the clients to send us backups, and assume that they are working correctly. The backup system reaches out to the clients and grabs the data it needs (usually via a software agent, but in our simple case here, Windows file sharing and robocopy will suffice)

I basically do this exact setup at home too - my wife's Mac is the "master" photo machine, with all of our pictures on it. The Mac Mini downstairs that is our media server runs rsync (the Unix equivalent to robocopy) and sucks down the iPhoto library on a regular basis, and that goes onto the attached storage array, which gets backed up to the cloud via BackBlaze. Essentially, I've implemented exactly what I outlined above, but with two Mac's, and it works great.

[Brotato]

I decided "mess it" and bought a year membership for unlimited family crashplan. for $8-9 a month it's schweet. only thing is, I can't get the bandwidth throttling to work correctly - Anyone else use crashplan?

[Rathji]

I have my bandwidth fully open, and still wish it would go faster, so I couldn't tell you how it has worked for me going slower.

I only backup to another site though, not to crashplan's servers.

[Lt.Spears]

Mcbackup?

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Lt.Spears

Mcbackup?

Backups are OK, restores are tricky

[Milt Schmidt]

I like spider oak https://spideroak.com/
I use it for off-site backup and syncing my computers. It's kind of like dropbox except it encrypts your data on your machine before it gets uploaded which is a very good feature.

Milt

[Yorkshire Flame]

Originally Posted by Brotato

I decided "mess it" and bought a year membership for unlimited family crashplan. for $8-9 a month it's schweet. only thing is, I can't get the bandwidth throttling to work correctly - Anyone else use crashplan?

I signed up for a free trail of Crashplan about two weeks ago, and so far I've been unable to access Crashplan Central for a total of 6 of the 14 days. Not impressed, and not what I'd call "reliable" if this is an indication of the norm.