Back up hard drives over 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

 

 

[CallMeDave]

I'm not going to try and address each of your questions specifically, but two things stand out:

 

- You're asking about Duplicate operations, where the data from one Source is written, file by file, to a Destination. Retrospect can perform Duplicate operations in either direction between a Client and the application.

 

- OS X files can only be copied to a machine that is currently running OS X; if you Duplicate the contents of an OS X hard drive to a machine running OS 9, the resulting files will loose all their unix information and will not boot as an OS X system. Of course, once the files have been Duplicated it's safe to again boot into OS 9.

 

Dave

[ghoffman]

Quote:

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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?)

 

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I don't think a cable modem is fast enough. The cable modem speed is asymetric, being blazing fast downloading data to your computer from the Internet, but quite pedestrian on the upload.

 

It would take hours to do a complete backup - 90+ hours for 5 GB - on a cable modem with a 128 Kbit uplink cap. That is, if everything was perfect.

 

Glenn

[davidduff]

it would probably take a while to mirror 5-15GB of data initially, but if you were going to perform a backup every night, you'd only be copying over changed files, which would likely be only a tiny fraction of the total size of the drives. ...and you can make things much more efficient by using filters so as not to copy cache files and other files that change a lot but don't really matter.

 

mirroring across the internet may be difficult for other reasons, however. for example, firewalls could complicate things if you have one on either side (work/home). depending on the specifics of your network configuration on either end, it may be difficult to get the retrospect server and client programs to communicate with each other. can you ping one machine from the other? if so, there's a decent chance you could get retrospect working.

 

retrospect is capable of doing backups across the internet via ftp, but this doesn't create a bootable copy of a drive, but rather a retrospect archive (split up into multiple files).