20 user/seat backup solution

[Deleted member 4644]

I am trying to backup 20 users in an all Mac environment.

I guesstimate my total backup size at about 8-12 TB. I was planning to use Time Machine Server Lion, but I found out that it is a joke.

It is impossible to save Time Machine backups to more than a single volume on a single server. Then, I heard about a lot of corruption issues with Time Machine. In short, it doesn't seem enterprise class/mission critical capable.

I looked into Retrospect 8 and heard it was total garbage. That is a client-server solution.

I then looked at the following:
http://www.econtechnologies.com//pages/cs/chrono_overview.html
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

From what I can tell, I could setup a NAS and then use either of those to copy to the NAS. It seems that those products might be more robust than Time Machine.

Anyone have any input?

Budget is about $4000 or maybe a bit more. I would like to avoid solutions like a vTrak array if possible ($8,000 ish).

Note, this is more for disaster recovery. We don't need really quick online backups for the most part...

 

[rugby]

Crashplan Pro or ProE will do what you want. mac mini + external storage for your destination.

 

[alent1234]

get one of these cloud solutions. why would you even think about something local for only 20 people

 

[rugby]

get one of these cloud solutions. why would you even think about something local for only 20 people

Because restoring data over the internet sucks.

Crashplan allows you to do both, local and cloud.

 

[dawks]

Because restoring data over the internet sucks.

Crashplan allows you to do both, local and cloud.

I'll second this. I just asked about a backup solution two weeks ago and someone suggested Crashplan as well.

The software works really good. You can backup locally (for free) and to the cloud if you want as well.

I backup our file server to another file server at a different location, and to the cloud. The versioning is great, and restore is super easy (locally or cloud).

Crashplan's internals are Java based so it works on the 3 major platforms.

If you get the Pro-E version, you get features like letting your users restore their own files. The free version has encryption, and the paid version steps the encryption up a level.

 

[Deleted member 4644]

Thanks, I will look into crashplan. The internet connection is really slow, so cloud based solutions are basically impossible.

I assume crashplan does not do bare metal restores?

 

[lokiju]

Amanda Backup is free and can be used on OS X.

I'm building a Linux server with it currently to control my IBM 2 drive LTO5 tape library.

 

[alent1234]

Because restoring data over the internet sucks.

Crashplan allows you to do both, local and cloud.

how often do you restore entire computers? and why not just put all files in one central location for easy backup and restore?

 

[PCTC2]

Thanks, I will look into crashplan. The internet connection is really slow, so cloud based solutions are basically impossible.

I assume crashplan does not do bare metal restores?

CrashPlan is a purely file-based backup. The nice thing is that it does incremental, so it also makes a good emergency revision control for when someone saves the wrong file and it had backed up before that. For Mac OS X and Windows, where there is FSevents, the backup engine only backs up the incremental changes. Linux has to do diffs across every file because it doesn't have any file system eventer.

I currently use CrashPlan PROe for two environments. One is a 200 user department backing up to a 60TB storage box. CrashPlan PROe handles it all without an issue. It alerts you when users haven't backed up within a few days, and also tells you when a datastore is corrupted and it generally will always just fix it itself. I've restored my own 250GB home directory twice from it. It's also great because it is cross-platform. We also have a secondary CrashPlan PROe slave server off-site backing up at the same time. CrashPlan will alternative backing up to each server, but each will get the same data.

The other environment is a smaller 10 user environment backing up to a 6TB RAID. This environment has a very slow Cable connection, but is mainly used to back up to local users over gigabit and wireless. Restoring across the internet is almost impossible, but for a local system, it's great.

It should be noted that it is also good at restarting backups (we used some other backup software that couldn't before). As a test on a business trip, I started a back up of around 10GB in San Diego, closed my laptop 25% of the way through, and flew to Washington DC. It figured out which file it was doing before, check-summed the backup, figured out it needed to do it again, and starting backing up from where it left off. Then I closed the laptop at around 60% done, and flew to Massachusetts. Let it get to 80% and flew back to San Diego, where it finished backing up on the home network.

 

[rugby]

how often do you restore entire computers? and why not just put all files in one central location for easy backup and restore?

That's how I organize this. We're a Crashplan reseller and we go a couple of routes.

1) Customer purchases CP Pro Server + seats and hosts it themselves internally. Then we put a slave CP Pro server to their Master in our datacenter to mirror all data offsite.

2) Customer rents CP PRo seats from us on a monthly basis and simply backs their machines (server or workstation) to a local destination and offsite.

We have had a couple of clients get their places broken into and their computers stolen. We restored their data from our main server and brought it to them on a hard drive the next day. Carbonite/Mozy/whatever other cheap cloud backup company can't do that.