Responses in your quoted message
Joshua Lewis wrote:
I have a customer who has learned the hard way (the very hard way) that
backups of your corporate data are imperative.
Well now that I have spent the last three days trying to recover their
data I need to implement a backup plan for them.
They only have a few drives for backup (two 40G and a 160G) up so I would
like to make a full backup this week and then schedule incremental backups
from now on.
The two 40G are probably going to get striped together and the 160 is
going to be a dedicated backup.
They do not have any tape drives only hard drives and to top it all off
they only have Macs. They are using a dedicated Mac running OS 9.2 acting
as a server.
I was hoping I could upgrade that system to OS X and I was wondering if
there are any FreeBSD utilities that would work for backing up. Otherwise
I will be setting up a freebsd backup server and I would like to save the
customer the money and not have to go that route.
This didn't quite make full sense to me (forgive me if I misread it).
If they have all mac machines, what kind of machines are they (specs?)?
I've noticed with a lot of older macs, upgrading to os x is going to
require you to get more ram otherwise your users will complain. I'd
suggest not considering os x if they're running anything released before
the blue and white g3s (new g4 sales were when os x started shipping
standard w/os 9.x and also when os 9 was no longer installed on the
later generation g4s).. I have a bw w/256 megs of ram on it. It's not
so bad, but I'd suggest having 384-512 (specs say they only take 512,
but they'll actually max otu and handle 1 gig quite well).
Since they obviously would want to stay with the mac platform, my
suggestion would be to bite the bullet and install os x on all the macs
and make the backup machine freebsd. Assume almost any command line
utility that exists for freebsd exists or can be compiled for mac os x
(see fink.sourceforge.net for the easiest installation
management...that's a broad statement so don't REALLY assume that's true
w/o doing your own research). If you leave os 9.2 on those macs, you'll
end up having to purchase software like mac pc-lan or other networking
clients. In the end, it'll be a waste of money when they upgrade to os
x anyway. the toss up is buying the os 9.2 software vs. upgrading to os
x and them buying os x versions of their software (if they don't run
classic in parallel with os x).
I don't know much about backups, but i'd say look into rsync (someone
else answer w/something better please).
To save a few bucks, I'd just install freebsd on their server machine.
On a side note, from what i've read (but never experienced) raid support
for mac classic can be summed up in 1 wordpthththththe:P Although
thye do exist, there are few hardware solutions for mac classic raid
and i don't know many people fond of software driven raid (esp if your
system crashes completely).
I am sorry for the many OS X questions I have been posting here over the
last few days but the Darwin mailing list did not respond. Does anyone
know of a good OS X mailing list I can join?
I don't know of any mailing lists, but I do suggest taking a look at
www.macosx.com (forums...pretty good) and www.macdevcenter.com
(o'reilly's site). The best source for info about personal experiences
would be to check http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/. That's where I always go
for mac hardware info on older machines.
Thank you,
Joshua Lewis
Take care,
adam
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