Why avoid the network? That seems like overthinking. For most folks, needs are modest, and incremental network backup an ideal solution. Which would you and your clients rather do: (1) lose data and settings because someone didn't take home the backup drives, and they were stolen, or (2) restore settings by hand and data from the cloud? Easy choice, I think.
Also, Calyam et. al didn't reach the conclusions you cited, as implied by "an OSU study reveals." Those stats are part of the literature review, and from studies published in 2005 and 2006, meaning the data is likely even older than that. I would be very surprised if things weren't quite different today.
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With the cost, you probably don't want to own several and rotate them offsite and by default, it's providing backup over network. As an automated system for consumers though, it seems like a solid choice. You get timemachine on the client node and it's own wifi access point is providing the backup storage.
I don't see anything in this article that is Mac specific. All the cautions and suggestions have been published before and any system admin worth his salt should know these. . This is what I call a "content free" bogus meaningless article meant to get the author published. I am disappointed that Tech Republic would even bother to publish this.
Some of the readers on tech republic are indeed new to managing systems or may be home users with a recent interest in the subject. One can't assume everyone reading the article already knows this stuff though it may be review for those of us who've seen it before. You could have chosen to skim the article and move on or skip it all together rather than taking the extra time to express your feelings of entitlement for something you don't pay for.
The real value in an article like this is the potential discussion afterwards where us readers may provide new and interesting solutions or strategies beyond what the article provided.
Here, I'll start:
The 3,2,1 strategy
- Have 3 seporate backups at minimum
- Have them on 2 different forms of storage media at minimum
- Have 1 of them off-site at minimum
(Thanks to a Security Now listener for that one. I'm just repeating it here.)
The real value in an article like this is the potential discussion afterwards where us readers may provide new and interesting solutions or strategies beyond what the article provided.
Here, I'll start:
The 3,2,1 strategy
- Have 3 seporate backups at minimum
- Have them on 2 different forms of storage media at minimum
- Have 1 of them off-site at minimum
(Thanks to a Security Now listener for that one. I'm just repeating it here.)
I agree that Time Machine is a good tool, especially when not over thinking. However, what you don't cover is exactly how you make sure you have a secure copy elsewhere. My Macmini has 3TB of data storage. It isn't feasible to back that up over a network but, as you point out, direct attach storage is just as vulnerable as the server itself.
Buy two or three external drives (about $80 per 2 TB drive these days?) keeping one attached to the machine at any given time. Once a week you replace the attached drive with the oldest of the three and move the now newest drive to a safe secondary location.
You also don't need to backup the entire drive since some of that will be osX itself which is easily restored from the original install disk. You really only need to point Time Machine at your user data. Applications are a bit of a grey area as they should be recoverable from original install media but time concerns may justify having them in the backup image.
That would be my thinking on it anyhow. With my own *nix systems, I backup the user home directory and any one-off storage directories outside of that (eg. VMs and related ISO images fall outside of the user home directories on my system). Since my reinstall from bare metal can be done in about an hour, the recovery process would be to do a fresh install of the OS then spend the second hour restoring those non-OS directories and user home directories. osX recovery would probably work the same though thankfully, our backups have been more about recovering accidentily deleted files rather than full system restores.
You also don't need to backup the entire drive since some of that will be osX itself which is easily restored from the original install disk. You really only need to point Time Machine at your user data. Applications are a bit of a grey area as they should be recoverable from original install media but time concerns may justify having them in the backup image.
That would be my thinking on it anyhow. With my own *nix systems, I backup the user home directory and any one-off storage directories outside of that (eg. VMs and related ISO images fall outside of the user home directories on my system). Since my reinstall from bare metal can be done in about an hour, the recovery process would be to do a fresh install of the OS then spend the second hour restoring those non-OS directories and user home directories. osX recovery would probably work the same though thankfully, our backups have been more about recovering accidentily deleted files rather than full system restores.
Dislike. Try telling us how to leverage time machine AND safely store backups? Time Machine can only be configured to use one external drive, and that drive cannot be in two places at once.
Time Machine backup isn't supported directly to a network drive. But is it safe to use a a Mac mini w/ Snow Leopard Server and the Iomega MiniMax as a target for Time Machine backups over a network? I see so many bad reports on the Time Capsule product that I'm hesitant to use them. But a MiniMax on a Mac mini is directly connected. Is Time Machine backup over the network reliable in that case?
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