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Managing backups of multiple computers to one "backup server"

 

Carbon Copy Cloner can be used to back up several Macs to one particular Mac on your network. When you have several machines in your home or office that are turned on and awake at predictable times of the day, this can be a good method of reducing the number of hard drives that you use for backup, and can also help you establish offsite backup practices by consolidating your data. I use this strategy myself, so I'll describe my setup further.

I have a G5 that stays on all the time (media server, file server, backup server, and runs my network). I have two hard drives attached to it, "Backup" and "Offsite Backup." The "Backup" hard drive is a staging hard drive -- it has a folder at the root level for each computer that I back up (five total). When I originally set up the backup task on my laptop, for example, I configured the remote Macintosh information as:

IP address: 10.0.1.11
Path: /Volumes/Backup/Mike

Ditto for the other four machines, but to their respective folders. Each of these machines is scheduled to back up to the "Backup" volume on a nightly or bi-nightly basis, and the backup server is then configured to clone "Backup" to "Offsite backup" once a night (actually very early in the morning) after all those other tasks have completed. Every other week my wife takes the "Offsite Backup" hard drive to work and brings home the one from work. This has been working solidly for me for over a year, and I've had a couple occasions where I've actually needed to retrieve data from the backup (so I know it's really working!).

There are advantages and disadvantages to backing up to a folder on a remote volume (e.g. "Backup"). The main advantage is that I don't have to make a guess at how much space to allocate to partitions for each of the computers I back up. There's one partition, and when space is tight I simply erase some of the archive folders or buy a larger hard drive.

I can't, however, boot from that hard drive because all the OSes are in sub folders. This is no big deal for me because I have plenty of bootable devices laying around. If I didn't, then I would probably partition the "Backup" hard drive and configure each machine to back up directly to one of the partitions, e.g.:

IP address: 10.0.1.11
Path: /Volumes/Backup_Mike <-- root of the "Backup_Mike" partition

That partition will be bootable if you back up your entire hard drive to it (e.g. both the OS and your user data) and if the disk is partitioned with a partitioning scheme that the machine you're trying to boot supports. The bonus to this method is that you can get back to productivity very quickly should you have some sort of disk failure.

The Intel vs. PPC partitioning issue certainly does complicate matters -- if you have a mix of Intel and PPC Macs, you're likely going to need separate bootable volumes for these machines. If I were in this situation, I would probably have two backup hard drives -- one partitioned as APM for the PPC Macs, and another partitioned as GPT for the Intel Macs -- then each drive sliced into however many volumes you need for backing up your computers. Alternatively, you could do as I have -- maintain separate boot drives (e.g. with a base installation of Mac OS X) for Intel and PowerPC Macs, then have another hard drive or partition with folders that are kept up to date with each machine you want to back up.