A product for securing external HD under desk?

[lcooperdesign]

Hi all,

I'm hoping somebody may be aware of or have a better solution for a product that secures an external HD to the under side of a desk.

I want to have the four iMacs in my department to be permanently connected to an external HD that keeps a mirror of our each macs internal drive, whether it be Time Machine, SuperDuper or CCC.

The idea being that if some unscrupulous types decide to steal our macs the drive mirrors will be left intact, our macs are replaced by the insurance and we continue where we left off.

So, in order to do this I was hoping to find some sort of enclosure, preferably with a door, that can be fixed with bolts to the underside of our desks. Does anyone know of a product that does this? I thought Kensington would have my back here but no.

Cheers in advance!

 

[Frosticus]

I'd suggest backing up the Macs over the network to a NAS securely located elsewhere in the building, rather than having an external drive co-located with the Mac itself. This would probably also be more cost effective, less obtrusive and easier to manage.

 

[lcooperdesign]

I'd suggest backing up the Macs over the network to a NAS securely located elsewhere in the building, rather than having an external drive co-located with the Mac itself. This would probably also be more cost effective, less obtrusive and easier to manage.

Thanks for the quick reply. How would you suggest I set this up, software-wise? The time machine approach felt a lot more integrated and instant. This really needs to be a hands-free solution. Thanks again.

 

[Frosticus]

Thanks for the quick reply. How would you suggest I set this up, software-wise? The time machine approach felt a lot more integrated and instant. This really needs to be a hands-free solution. Thanks again.

Once you have a NAS set up, each Mac should be able to see this as a drive, and you simply set this as your target for the Time Machine backups. I have not tried other solutions, but Time Machine would certainly seem the most integrated/seamless and require little (if any) tinkering after the initial set-up.

Just make sure the NAS you use has plenty of capacity to do a full backup of each Mac and uses a RAID array to provide extra robustness/reliability. Ensuring that the capacity is easily expandable might also be a good idea, in case you choose to add more Macs in the future.

Also, backups of this many machines will initially take a while, especially over the network. I would suggest doing the first backup on each machine in turn, and preferably over Ethernet. Once the big first one is done, incremental backups simultaneously overnight shouldn't be a problem.