Help with managing backups in my house

[Treyr]

Hi,

I need help figureing out the best way to backup all the data in my house. I currently have 3 Macbook Pro's and an iMac in my house. I am tired of losing data as I have lost 2 hard drives within the past two years. I am looking for a way to backup the MacBooks without having to plug them in to a hard drive every night.

I am currently looking at either using an older custom build Windows desktop and turning it into a Linux Server, buying an old XServe for around 100 off of eBay, or using an old G4 iMac(flower pot model) with an old OSX Server version on it.

My main question is if turning the desktop into a Linux Server would be a usable option using the Time Machine process built into the Macs. Also this would need to be a very stable way of doing this as three peoples data backups would depend on this.

The other question is if I bought an old XServe, would it be a usable as I would be buying a first or second gen XServe that would be pretty old. Also, when buying one that old would I be able to fit enough hard drives into to get about 2TB of data on it.(I would not want to use Raid)

My concern with using the iMac is that it is pretty slow and there is little to no room for space expansion in it without buying an expensive drobo type device.

I'm up for other suggestions as well but I really do not want to spend over 100 dollars on the whole thing, and by the way I have multiple hard drive lying around at home so I would probably only have to buy one or two more.

Thanks ahead of time for your help,
Trey

 

[belvdr]

I know this exceeds your budget, but before I'd even think of buying (or commissioning) an old server to manage, I'd simply get an Airport Extreme and an external USB hard drive. It just works and you won't have to worry about managing or updating it.

Although it may be pricier depending on your needs, you can also just purchase a Time Capsule.

I'm fond of the AEBS and an external drive, as if the drive fails, I just plug in a new one which takes just a few seconds. The TC gives a cleaner look though.

 

[Eric M]

Used NAS or HP microserver

I can't recommend HP Microservers enough - have 2 running at the moment - 1 doing all backups (5 computers mixed OS env.) and the other one running 3VMs.
Best thing is you can get them very cheap now as HP is running a cashback scheme. Just Google it.

 

[Treyr]

Ok, so I ended up putting Ubuntu onto an old custom desktop I had laying around and then set it up using netatalk to back using time machine.