Scheduled system backups program

[adam]

Responses in your quoted message

Joshua Lewis wrote:

>I have a customer who has learned the hard way (the very hard way) that
>backups of your corporate data are imperative.
>
>Well now that I have spent the last three days trying to recover their
>data I need to implement a backup plan for them.
>
>They only have a few drives for backup (two 40G and a 160G) up so I would
>like to make a full backup this week and then schedule incremental backups
>from now on.
>
>The two 40G are probably going to get striped together and the 160 is
>going to be a dedicated backup.
>
>They do not have any tape drives only hard drives and to top it all off
>they only have Macs. They are using a dedicated Mac running OS 9.2 acting
>as a server.
>
>I was hoping I could upgrade that system to OS X and I was wondering if
>there are any FreeBSD utilities that would work for backing up. Otherwise
>I will be setting up a freebsd backup server and I would like to save the
>customer the money and not have to go that route.
>  
>
This didn't quite make full sense to me (forgive me if I misread it).  
If they have all mac machines, what kind of machines are they (specs?)?  
I've noticed with a lot of older macs, upgrading to os x is going to 
require you to get more ram otherwise your users will complain.  I'd 
suggest not considering os x if they're running anything released before 
the blue and white g3s (new g4 sales were when os x started shipping 
standard w/os 9.x and also when os 9 was no longer installed on the 
later generation g4s)..  I have a b&w w/256 megs of ram on it.  It's not 
so bad, but I'd suggest having 384-512 (specs say they only take 512, 
but they'll actually max otu and handle 1 gig quite well).

Since they obviously would want to stay with the mac platform, my 
suggestion would be to bite the bullet and install os x on all the macs 
and make the backup machine freebsd.  Assume almost any command line 
utility that exists for freebsd exists or can be compiled for mac os x 
(see fink.sourceforge.net for the easiest installation 
management...that's a broad statement so don't REALLY assume that's true 
w/o doing your own research).  If you leave os 9.2 on those macs, you'll 
end up having to purchase software like mac pc-lan or other networking 
clients.  In the end, it'll be a waste of money when they upgrade to os 
x anyway.  the toss up is buying the os 9.2 software vs. upgrading to os 
x and them buying os x versions of their software (if they don't run 
classic in parallel with os x).

I don't know much about backups, but i'd say look into rsync (someone 
else answer w/something better please).

To save a few bucks, I'd just install freebsd on their server machine.

On a side note, from what i've read (but never experienced) raid support 
for mac classic can be summed up in 1 word....pthththththe:P  Although 
thye do exist, there are few hardware solutions for mac classic raid  
and i don't know many people fond of software driven raid (esp if your 
system crashes completely). 

>I am sorry for the many OS X questions I have been posting here over the
>last few days but the Darwin mailing list did not respond. Does anyone
>know of a good OS X mailing list I can join?
>
>  
>
I don't know of any mailing lists, but I do suggest taking a look at 
www.macosx.com (forums...pretty good) and www.macdevcenter.com 
(o'reilly's site).  The best source for info about personal experiences 
would be to check http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/.  That's where I always go 
for mac hardware info on older machines.

>
>Thank you,
>Joshua Lewis
>
>  
>

Take care,
adam