Time Capsule strategy advice required.

[Larry767]

I have a small network of less than 10 macs, all on ethernet connected to a centrally located switch. We have a Snow Leopard Server for storing and sharing about 300 GB of documents amongs the users and I currently have it setup to let all the macs backup to an external drive connected to it and enabled for Time Machine. We have a fiberoptic line connecting our building to another building about 500 m away. Initially, this line was used to access a router but now we are going to move the router into our building. But, the fiber line will still be available and we would like to use it to send an offsite backup over. What should we do?



We could purchase a Time Capsule and put it in the other building but would we then disable the Time Machine on the server and have all the clients AND the server backup over the fiber line to the Time Capsule? Can I backup the Time Machine backups to the Time Capsule? What I mean is, leave all the clients backing up to the server and then backup the server to a remote time capsule? Would that even work? If the main building burnt could I restore the Time Machine backups to a drive and then from there restore them to client?



Any advice will be appreciated.

 

[r0k]

Network based backup to a Time Capsule should never be seen as your only line of defense. I have had network based TM to TC backups fail a half dozen times, 2 of which actually cost me data and 1 of which the data was gone forever.

If you want to back up to a TC, whatever you do, make sure you are using fast ethernet. And by fast I mean gigabit. If you run wireless backup, it should be n. 802.11g is not fast enough and you run the risk of geting corrupted backups which are a placebo but not a location from which you could ever hope to retrieve lost data.

As for the whole which TC is in which building thing, make sure the link from the machine being backed up to the TC it is backing up to is wired gigabit or wireless n or better.

I suggest a combination of local backups using crashplan (free) to usb drives combined with TM over the network to a TC. This plan has the advantage of providing multiple recovery options. In my case, one of the times the TC backup went corrupt, I was able to get all my wife's files back from crashplan's server (paid) but I'm confident I could have used crashplan to a usb drive if I had wanted to. Another free option is carbon copy cloner. Just don't make the mistake of thinking of Time Machine (especially to a Time Capsule) as your only backup and you'll do fine.