straz Posted October 9, 2003 Report Share Posted October 9, 2003 I have two Macs (A and in two broadband-equipped homes. I'd like to use each Mac as an offsite backup for the other. Both are OSX 10.2.8 with external Maxtor 250GB firewire drives and Retrospect Express 5.0.238. I'm currently backing up Mac A to the local firewire drive. Its archive file is now 8GB. Mac B is running an ftp server and has a spare 250GB firewire drive. If I run Retrospect on Mac A, and save the backups to the drive on Mac B, it looks like the first complete backup will take about 2 weeks, if it even completes at all. I have to admit, that seems very scary to me. 1) Can I take my current 8GB backup on Mac A and move it (via sneakernet) to Mac B, and spare myself the 2 week initial backup? I guess I'm wondering, is the file format identical? 2) Should I worry about an upper limit (32k segments? what is that in bytes?) on ftp archive size? 3) If I need to restore Mac A from disaster, can I bring the archive back by sneakernet and restore from the external firewire drive, or does the restore have to be over ftp too? 4) Are there any important speed/reliability/capacity differences I should be aware of, between Mac A backup over internet to Mac B using Retrospect Express 5.0.238/Mac, versus using Retrospect Client on Mac A and Retrospect Desktop on Mac B? I'm willing to configure either way, just want to know if one way is wicked faster or way more reliable. many thanks, steve Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted October 9, 2003 Report Share Posted October 9, 2003 Hi As long as you are using FTP backup sets for the local and remote backups your Idea to get around the slow initial backup should work. If it were me I think I would get 2 external hard drives and just do a rotation scheme via sneaker net as you mentioned. It is abit more laborious but given the speed issues it may be a better option Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
straz Posted October 9, 2003 Author Report Share Posted October 9, 2003 Thanks. The two locations are 200 miles apart, so sneakernet is not practical for daily backups. Can you tell me if the FTP backup set is a different file format from a normal File backup set? Will I be able to run incremental FTP backups on top of a normal File backup set? thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted October 10, 2003 Report Share Posted October 10, 2003 Hi All of the backup sets in Retrospect are unique and cannot be mixed together. If you want to use Internet backup you have to start with an Internet backup set. I'm not sure how well this will work but try creating an internet backup set and type in the login and IP information for the local machine. That should let you do an internet backup to the machine itself. Once that is done you can haul the data to your other site and update the IP and login info. Not sure it will work but it is worth a try... Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
straz Posted October 21, 2003 Author Report Share Posted October 21, 2003 Well, I'm still stuck. I drove 200 miles to my dad's house and tried creating the internet backup set on his machine. I used 127.0.0.1 as the server name and it didn't get very far. Please read this posting for more info. thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted October 27, 2003 Report Share Posted October 27, 2003 Hi Try it with the IP address of the ethernet adapter, the loopback address will not work. Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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