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senorchupacabra

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 11, 2003
26
0
What's the easiest and most efficient way to provide a backup solution for an office where there are 10 computers? Of those 10 computers 4 are PC's, 3 G4's(dual bootable) are running OS 9.2.2 and 10.3.2 and 2 Macs are running OS 9.1. 1 G4 iBook is running 10.3.2. Everyone is on a LAN and can see each other including the PC's. However there are 2 PS Printers, namely Epson Stylus Color 3000's that only one is set up through a print server and can be seen by all computers that are running OS 9 but for some reason cannot be seen in OS X.

1. What's the best solution for file backup for everyone?

2. What's the best way to get both Epson Stylus Color 3000's on the LAN and accessible to everyone?

3. Is there a solution for both?

Thank you in advance for your input and help.

Sincerely,

senorchupacabra
 
I share all of my printers via a network print server. This way you can set the print server to an IP, and all machines can print to it. You could share the printer from one of the Windows machines and print to it from the Mac, but by using a print server, you are guaranteed that each OS prints to the printer directly and the job is handled by each machine.

Now, for the backup, that's going to be tough. I use Veritas BackupExec 9.0 and haven't had a problem. Of course, each user is responsible for copying his/her data to their file share, because that is the only drive that gets backed up to tape. I don't know of any companies that backup the client computers either. That's just way too much administrative overhead.

Also, keep in mind that you do not need to backup the OS, just the data. Backing up the OS isn't needed because you'd have to reload the OS anyway in order to load the backup client, so what's the point. Waste of time and waste of tape.
 
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