how would you configure these items

[GregE]

Hi all,

I need to come up with a plan on having a backup of my system. I have a 24" iMac with 500GB internal HDD, and 15" MacBook Pro with 320GB internal HDD, an AirPort Extreme, a Guardian Maximus with 750GB drives, and a Guardian Maximus with 1TB drives. I use Entourage on my iMac and I've read where Time Machine doesn't like to back up Entourage.

I'm wondering what is the best way to set up my system. I figure I should use Time Machine to back up my documents on the iMac. I will also share that folder so the MacBook Pro can access them. I would have liked to put them on an EHD off of the AEBS so both the iMAc and MacBook Pro could access them but I didn't know if I could make both of them know to look there for documents. Should I also use Time Machine to back up my iTunes and photos or should I move those to one of the Maximus'? I figure I need to have my Entourage database on one of the Maximus' or else back it up by hand occasionally. How would you set it up? Let me know if you need any more info.

Thanks

Greg

 

[angelwatt]

I personally use Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) as my backup software of choice. Depends what kind of backing up I need though as well. I also use Time Machine for one of my computers then use the rsync command line tool for other kinds of backups.

 

[ChrisA]

To do the "right" you will need more disks. I guess it all depends on what happens if you loose the data. Does youe business depend on this are would loosing it just means you'd have to re-install some software and load some photos off CD copies.

If you really can't aford to loos the data then you need to have at least three copies and for those copies to be at two different geographical locations. Anything less than that and it's "when" not "if" you will loose the data. Think about fires, threft of the equipment, software glitches and soon.

The worst case it that a file become corrupted and you don't know it (No one checks all there files every day) and then you backup system over-writes an old backup (containing a copy of the file before it was damages) with a copy of the damaged file, destroying your only good copy. Time Machine prevents this by keeping all the old copies. "Cloning" software is much less sophisticated and overwrites the older data. Use software that works like Time Machine and does "incremental" backups. The down side is that you need a much larger backup disk. But 1TB drives sell now for $100.

I would connect a Time Machine drive to EACH computer and then periodically make redundant backups to another drive and rotate those to an off-site location. Disk crashes are not the #1 cause of data loss. Theft of equipment is right up there along with "operator error".

If you only have two externals, use the biggest one for TM and use it for both computers. TM will keep this straight as each willbe placed in a folder with the computer's name. Use the second drive for off-site. Bring it home periodically to be refreshed. You can use TM for this too.

As you buy more drives you can then give each computer it's own TM drive and have more drives to rotate through other locations