Subject: Re: [netatalk-admins] Mac backup solutions

From: Harry Zink <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Jun 1998 12:47:40 -0800

>Today my boss put me in charge of coming up with a robust, convenient,
>yet affordable backup solution for the nine Macs, and 6 NT/95 machines in
>our office. 

Retrospect Remote is pretty much the ONLY effective solution for what you 
are looking at.

Yes, you need to run it from a central Mac, from where you administer the 
backups, but Retrospect has far too many advantages for the task you 
listed. I'd love there to be a Linux/netatalk based solution, but none 
are transparent enough.

>I was thinking I could hook up the tape drive to the Linux box,
> share it via Netatalk, then backup to it using Retrospect.  Retrospect
>does full NT and Win95 backups as well.

*WAY* too complicated, and you will be suffering a performance loss. 
Don't even know how you wouuld be shariung the tape drive, unless you 
share it as a volume you write to. When you have the drive hoked up to 
the machine running Retrospect, Retro uses it's own native way to access 
the drive, which will yield far better throughput than going over the 
network twice.

Once retrieving the data from your server, or clients, then sending it 
over the network to the tape drive.

Not very efficient.

The other option you have is having your clients save the data they want 
to backup to folders on the netatalk machine - but that depends on 
clients actually religiously backing up. Since you are in charge, the 
last thing you need is some user NOT backiung up their local machine, 
losing the drive, and then blaming you for not having an effective backup 
solution.

Besides, you'd be having the redundnat network travel of your data.

I think it's good to find effective ways to integrate netatalk into 
office environments, but don't juggle with something as crucial as backup 
of data.

Harry