Advice for backing up small home network

[slbrown]

I have been using (misusing!) a version of Retrospect bundled with a Maxtor USB drive for about a year and found that when my primary computer crashed I couldn't recover much with the backup set I had made several months earlier. I have now purchased Retrospect Professional 7.0 (RP7) and want to be sure I use it wisely this time. While I consider myself fairly techie, I am certainly not an IT person, and a rank amateur at backup.

 

I have a home network with a main desktop, another desktop for my wife, and (sometimes) a laptop I use on travel, all attached to a Belkin hub, which is attached to a DSL line. All are Dells of various ages running Windows XP with Service Pack 2. I have installed RP7 on the "server" (my desktop) and the two "clients" and seem to be able to access the latter from my desktop. My backup destination would be the Maxtor, which has about the same capacity as all three machines, each of which is less than half full. We typically turn off all computers at night, which probably makes the scheduled running of script a bad idea.

 

I understand the difference between duplicate and backup, although words like "grooming" are still a bit mysterious. Based on the usage patterns, I think I might want to do a full backup of the server once a month or two and a duplicate once a week, with the backups of the other two less frequently. But maybe that is not frequently enough--advice welcome.

 

What I am looking for is a simple template or step-by-step instructions for managing the backup process: What events should make me run a full backup? Do I need a new disaster recovery CD each time? What files should be included in the duplicate (e.g., the "Documents and Settings" folder and all its subsidiaries)? Should I use the "Run Document" feature to make things easier each time?

 

Thanks for any help.

 

Steve B

 

BTW, it looks like "Nate W" monitors this forum and provices lots of useful advice. Much appreciated.

[tdcarp]

Hi Steve

 

I'm not going to have any good answers for you but am willing to work through this with you because I think we have a similar situation. I also am interested in asking you about the Maxtor device since I'm just about ready to invest in my first external storage device for my config.

 

Briefly, I have a Mac G4 desktop and 2 PC laptops. I have Retrospect on the Mac. I haven't quite made the Mac the "server" yet partly because there are some cross-platform issues I haven't resolved yet.

 

What I think I understand is that an external device, like the Maxtor, whether USB, Firewire, or CAT5 is the place to take the more frequent backups (or imaging) of the device HDs. I assume what you are now doing is using RS to provide both your "frequent" and your "archive" or "disaster" backups, which I think I understood you were using CD-Rs for.

 

I assume you have RS on both of the desktops, but how do you handle the backup of the laptop? In our case we use our laptops extensively.

 

Maybe you know where I might find a 101-level tutorial on a configuration backup method one click lower than the questions you're asking. I do understand RS well enough but it's things like "whether to use an external drive in the backup model and, if used, how to use it effectively".

 

I'll keep looking around and will pass back any insights I might find.

 

Tom

[slbrown]

Tom:

 

I'm probably not the one to be giving you advice, but I'll tell you what I know.

 

I bought the Maxtor about a year ago specifically to back up all three computers. It came bundled with a minimal version of Retrospect 6.0 (maybe "Express"?), which I installed separately on all three. I then ran a full backup of each computer (system image?) to separate folders on the Maxtor.

 

Maxtor also has a "One-Touch" feature that allows you to press a button on the drive and get a backup going with no further intervention. I'm guessing it uses a Maxtor-specific Retrospect script, but that's not clear. It makes a duplicate of files and folders you pick, not a compressed backup of the system, and can't duplicate any open files, which prevented me from backing up some parts of "Documents and Settings" (the user-specific files on a PC). Regardless, I also started a program of doing "One Touch" duplicates on a schedule that differed between the machines. This resulted in three more folders on the Maxtor.

 

Because the Maxtor uses a USB port, I can just haul it around to make the backups, and store it anywhere I want--in a safe if I had one--so I can use it for disaster recovery, too. I never used CDs for backup, as I calculated that I would need dozens of them to do a full system backup and maybe more than one to do even the One Touch duplicates. My reference to CD was to the bootable CD that R7P will make to help you recover your system from any backup medium.

 

Now that I have R7P instead of the Express version, I supposedly can back up all three computers to the Maxtor using my desktop as the "server" and defining the other two as "clients" without having to haul the Maxtor around. All that is required is to install the full R7P on the server and the client versions on the clients and to configure the network so the server can see the clients properly when R7P is running.

 

I don't know anything about networking Macs and PCs together, so I don't know whether you could make the same setup work.

 

Steve B

[tdcarp]

I want to bring this topic back up (over a year later) to see if the advice is still the same. I finally got around to buying an external HD (actually 2 of them). One sits waiting to be installed on the Mac G4 where it will run that system's backups. I use Retro 6.0.204 there.

 

The other is handling the backup chores for three PCs but I have to use the software that came with the Seagate because I'm too cheap to buy a PC version of Retrospect (yet).

 

Steve B's post implies that R7P will allow me to make the desktop the server and the laptops as clients. Does anyone know if this will work across platforms? I do have the Mac defined on each of the laptops for fileshare but don't know if Retrospect will work across the PC/Mac chasm.

 

Thanks

 

Tom

[nekr0phage]

Hi Tom,

 

Retrospect will work cross-platform without any filesharing configuration. You just need to use the Retrospect clients on any machine not running the full program. This can be a very simple setup depending on what you want to backup. Keep in mind, however, that the professional version only comes with two client licenses.