Can I mirror hard drives across the 'Net?

[clinto]

I have two Macs at my office and one Mac at my home. I want to know if I can use Retrospect to maintain complete mirrored images (including boot-up capability) of the hard drives in each Mac.

 

More specifically, I want to mirror the drives of my Macs at work on a hard disk at my home. And I want to mirror the drive of my Mac at home on a hard drive at work. (You know the scenario - what if the building burns down....) I have cable modem service at both locations.

 

Can I ask a few questions. This is somewhat new to me, and I want to have an idea of what I'm getting into before I actually try to do it. (In glancing through the forums, it looks like you need to be an IT guru to make this work.)

 

1. Can Retrospect perform back-ups from one computer to a hard drive on a remote computer over the internet?

 

2. At my office I have a Mac G3 running OS 9.1 and a G4 running OS X. At home I have another G4 running OS X. How much work am I looking at to set up a back up system in which each computer is backed up to a hard drive in the other location?

 

3. I have between 5 GB and 15 GB of "stuff" on each hard drive. Is it unreasonable to do a complete back up of each drive every night? (Or would that take hours, even at cable modem speeds?) In my dream world, if I have a hard drive failure, I would be able to simply take the remote (backed up) hard drive to the damaged computer, plug in the back up drive, and resume work as if nothing had happened.

 

4. Even though I have two machines with OS X, I'm still not completely comfortable with it. (I still do 90% of my work on the good old G3 with good old OS 9.) Are there any special things I need to know about making this work with OS X?

 

 

I appreciate any tips or advice anybody can give... How to set it up. Land mines to watch out for.... Hardware and/or software recommendations...

 

Thanks,

 

Clint