Using a Mac Mini as a Backup Server

[wiz329]

I go to a smaller college, and I've noticed that hardly any of my friends back up their computers regularly. Most of them don't have more than 100 GB or so on their computer, so backing up would be relatively easy. So I thought that starting some sort of backup service would be a smart business idea.

The whole campus is connected via wifi. My question: what would be the best solution for backing up macs wirelessly? Bear in mind, we do not have access to hard wire internet.

Option 1: Buy an airport extreme, attach it to the college's wireless network, and hook up a couple hitachi 7k3000s in RAID1. For every computer, I would set up a separate partition, and i believe you can password protect each of these with the airport utility, but I am not sure.

Option 2: Buy a used mac mini, attach the same HDD setup as above, and turn file sharing on. Then, like the other option, set up a partition for each computer to back up wirelessly via time machine.

If I chose option 2, how would I be able to secure each of the partitions, so only they (plus the mac mini) would only be accessible to a designated computer? Is OS X server required to do this?

thanks!

 

[miles01110]

The best way to do it would be to encourage your friends to find their own solution. The legal issues (about control of your friends' data) are potentially significant, as are the conflicts you might run into with your university IT department over a potentially unauthorized repeater on their network.

 

[old-wiz]

I would also worry about your friends downloading illegal content and then storing it on your machine - what would be your liability in this case?

I would stick to doing your own backup and let the others fend for themselves.

 

[Bye Bye Baby]

And what would you do if you had a HD fail?

You would be liable for data loss etc.

A bag of hurt my friend.

 

[FluJunkie]

Yeah, don't do this.

1. You're probably violating the University's terms of use of their network.
2. You will, without a doubt, have the system go down and take someone's term paper with it.
3. You don't want to deal with what happens when your friend torrents...stuff. Be it illegal stuff in the RIAA sense, or illegal stuff in the FBI sense. Just...don't.

 

[wiz329]

1. I'm pretty sure torrent protocols or whatever that is called are blocked on the network, although i'm sure they could have previously downloaded stuff.

2. I'm not planning on offering this to anyone i don't know personally.

3. These are BACKUPS. So the worst that can happen if BOTH drives happen to fail simultaneously is that person will lose the backup of their term paper. If their computer hard drive and my two hard drives all fail simultaneously ... i guess God just hates them.

4. I've already set up a time capsule for a friend and connected it to the college's network, and ran it thru the IT department. Had to register the MAC address and everything. How is this any different?

 

[Tulpa]

There are probably a lot of things you don't know about the people you know personally... and every instance of the FBI-related things FluJunkie was alluding to is 5 years or so in prison and not being allowed to live in 90% of the housing in most cities. Not a chance I'd take.