[MacTUG] Timemachine, Filevault, and Servers, oh my!

[Donald Duff-McCracken]

OK so here is my pile of questions that will give you something to think about on a Friday…

Timemachine and backups across the network:
I have a couple of mac mini servers with reasonable sized drives attached. I have multiple macs I want to back up to them. (For now, not that many, lets say 6.) Currently it is working, but they are backing up to one partition and it works fine at the beginning but eventually one mac becomes a pig and takes over the whole partition. Basically I want to quota each mac so they start throwing out old backup sets instead of just growing forever. According to what I have read, using Quota on the server does not really work. I have read a bit of setting the size of the sparseimage (or even creating a sparse image and naming it so timemachine will find it). I have tried this and it seems to work.
A few questions:

  1.  Is there some better way to do this (I do not want to create a partition for each client)?
  2.  Will it conflict when Filevault is thrown into the equation?

Speaking of Filevault:

  1.  OK, so the first question is how do I do this with limiting the size of the sparseimage, will the above work?
  2.  I understand how filevault (in the Lion version, at least) will let us recover individual files from our existing mac, but what about recovering from a disaster.. If a mac is stolen or blown up, how does one get a filevaulted timemachine backup onto a new machine? (And will my farting around with limiting the sparseimage size, screw things up).

Inquiring minds want to know!

don



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Donald Duff-McCracken
Technical Services Manager
Mapping, Analysis & Design
Faculty of Environment
University of Waterloo
(519) 888-4567 x32151
http://www.environment.uwaterloo.ca/computing/people/don.html
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