[spiffothemouse]

Hi, I'm guessing this is a pretty complex situation with an equally tough fix, but I was hoping some experienced network people could point me in the right direction. Here's the situation:

I work in a medium-sized university research lab, so there are at least 6-10 people who bring their laptops to do work on, plus three common computers, and then around 4 more computers dedicated to instruments (96-well plate readers, etc). Two of the common computers are Macs, at least two members have laptop Macs, and most of the instrument-dedicated computers are Macs as well. All the Macs are running Tiger, but we'd like to upgrade to Leopard in the near future. Most of the Windows PCs are laptops used by grad students, though there is at least one desktop PC paired with an instrument.

Currently, our backup solution is a Snap Server 2200 with SnapOS, which AFAIK is not compatible with Time Machine (and has a really annoying 32 character file name limit!!!) and ChronoSync for scheduling said backups.

What I'd like to do (if possible) is to set up a central server that everyone can store data to (with a backup either network attached or extra hard drives on the same machine) and access from any machine on the local network (or remotely if we want to get crazy about it). This way we wouldn't have to go to a specific machine to retrieve the data stored only locally.

If that above situation is WAAAY too complicated and/or expensive, and we'll just have to write off the central networking, how difficult is it to set up Time Machine so it'll back up all the Macs on a local network to a central location? What about setting up just the Macs to be 'portals' to a central server with all the data, so you can log in from anywhere on the network and get the same prefs/data?

Thanks for your input!

[ghporter]

OS X Server is built for this. But for what you're looking to do, it's probably both overly complex and expensive. You'd need a fairly powerful Mac (like a Mac Pro) and toss in a bunch of drives, and then of course to buy Server, install it and configure it...

One option is to get a (or multiple) NAS box. These act as network drives, and you can get them with or without the hard drives themselves. It's fairly easy to configure them and once set up they are usually completely transparent. Figure $200 for a half-terabyte drive and less than $50 for the NAS box, and you see that, for a server solution it's pretty inexpensive.

[spiffothemouse]

Interesting about OSX Server - I know very little about it, but can it act as a central repository for all data and allow a specific user to log onto any machine and access data? While simultaneously organizing backups?

Can you explain a little more about the NAS box? Is that essentially what the Snap Server is, or are they different? Is the NAS box meant more for a backup solution or is it designed to be used as a central server that anyone can access?

Thanks for your quick reply, ghporter!

[besson3c]

I would suggest using rsync, which is available in all Unix OSes as well as Windows. It performs amazingly well and scales beautifully - we transfer over 6 TB of data every night with it.

I would suggest using rsync in conjunction with SSH public key authentication.

[spiffothemouse]

So rsync will take care of all the backup needs I have identified, it sounds like. Can that be run on an open source NAS (like a Buffalo)? How easy is rsync to set up?

[besson3c]

It can be run on any server that has both SSH and rsync installed. You'd be hard pressed to find a Unix distro that didn't have both, it's mostly a matter of whether or not SSH has been enabled.

Rsync is a command line tool, so it will take some time to figure out what options you want to use, but for a backup you will probably want to look into -a (for archive), --delete (if you want to delete files on your backup disk that are no longer on your source disk), and -v for testing.

There are plenty of tutorials on setting up SSH public key authentication so that you can do your backups securely and non-interactively/automatically.

[ghporter]

I don't know if my NAS idea will be of help with the backup ideas you and besson3c have apparently come up with - I had honestly simply thought about simple hardware.

A NAS box is an enclosure that makes your drive a network drive. Sort of like the Snap Server, but not as complicated. It's very much like a firewire enclosure, (actually it IS a USB enclosure as well), but instead of firewire, it connects your drive to your network.

I have no idea what OS my CoolMax CN-550 NAS runs on, but it's apparently a closed device. And I can't find any mention of rsync, let alone SSH in connection to it. It sounds like a Linux server is your better bet, for security at the very least. Fortunately they can be fairly inexpensive to put together.