[MacTUG] Backing up to an SMB volume, or versa visa ;-)

[Lawrence Folland]

Sounds like what we're using OwnCloud for.  It is a DropBox-like equivalent running on a local fileserver.  You install the OwnCloud client on whichever machines you want to replicate the data on.  I have it on my laptop, my desktop computer at my desk at work and my desktop computer at home.  It will do an initial sync and then updates files as they change.  The updated file is available to each machine.  That provides an inherent backup system since you replicate it to each machine.   There are Windows, Mac and Linux clients.  WE have the server running on a Linux box with local storage.  So far it's in pre-production mode but those who are using it (me and a few faculty members) really like it!  On the server, the files are encrypted.  All communications are over an encrypted SSH connection.

Lawrence

From: mactug-bounces at lists.uwaterloo.ca [mailto:mactug-bounces at lists.uwaterloo.ca] On Behalf Of Donald Duff-McCracken
Sent: February-26-15 10:44 AM
To: MacTUG
Subject: [MacTUG] Backing up to an SMB volume, or versa visa ;-)

Once again I have a user who wants to work on is documents on more than one computer. On and off campus.It is more data that can fit on his N-Drive, but fortunately he does have an SMB fileserver that he uses. The problem is that the fileserver that he is using is not backed up in a manner that sufficiently satisfies his needs.

If he was confident the data on this server was being backed up, he could work from it. He could also work from the data locally on his work mac (which has 2 time machine backups) and if the data was synched on a regular basis with the SMB server this would be good enough to let him work at home on the weekend, etc.

Obviously, if it was easy and official way to run time machine on a SMB volume, it would be a no brainer. I am considering suggesting he look at some third party backup software.

So has anyone had any recent experience with non-timemachine backup software? I used to have a group using Prosoft's Data Backup, and I think it worked reasonably, but that was a while ago.

One of the issues is that he has a reasonable amount of data that he needs to have access to - about 40 gigs. This size precludes him just using his N Drive. It also precludes doing something somewhat kludgy like using a sparse disk on the SMB server as I think that would hammer the network. It has to be something that is not going to be hammering that network when a backup occurs. It sounds like he has a lot of small files and few change on a daily basis. So I am not concerned with large files going through the pipes, but it needs to be able to do incremental backups and the process of determining what files need backup needs to be fairly network efficient.

Any suggestions? I might just get him to try a few of these products to see if they work as they are not much and often have time limited demos. But if anyone has been in a similar solution and found a cheap and easy option I would like to hear.


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