Volker, Jim wrote:
On 7/2/09 9:30 AM, "Hakan Kaya" <email@hidden> wrote:
Am 02.07.2009 um 03:34 schrieb Brian F. Opitz:
elusiv3 wrote:
I have been using Time Machine as a backup on
a few servers for about 6 months with no issues. It's very handy for
restoring files to user homes. If a user deletes a file that was there
an hour ago I can very easily get it back. Depending on your backup up
needs and the services that your server is running I think Time Machine
is a very good reliable option.
On 02/07/2009, at 12:30 AM, Steve Meredith wrote:
I'm new to the list, please forgive me if this
has been asked and answered!
Our HP Tape backup failed,
it can no longer read-write to tape. I was thinking a faster method
would be to use TimeMachine as a server grade backup.
Wondering about the
reliability, rotation of media (two separate drives) etc.
Thoughts
Please.
This has been discussed so many times before on this list that we don't
need to hear it anymore. Time Machine is designed for the home user.
Period. To use it in a mission-critical, production, environment is
simply lunacy. Would you risk your paycheck on it? I know I wouldn't.
I don't quite get the point, why this product should be exclusively
designed for the home user when Apple did include it in the server
version to be used in not-so-home environments.
Maybe backing up the server itself is another issue that could be
discussed but obviously TM is not intended for home use only by its
producer. So lunacy seems a bit far fetched to me.
Hakan Kaya
Chess and Photo Booth come with MOSXS too. That’s no metric of Apple’s
intent that you use them on your server.
--jim
--
james volker
technical director // school of web design + new media
the academy of art university
415.618.3915 desk // 415.618.3800 fax
Given the fact that the operating system is OS X client -and OS X
Server is all the savory tidbits that we all have come to know and love
that give us the 'server' part installed on top of OS X client- with TM
included, it still does not make TM an enterprise level backup solution
simply because of its inclusion in in OS X Server. We have all
read/seen -and discussed- this many times before about the
problems/limitations of using it for backing up a live,
production-level, server.
If you have budget limitations or basic backup needs, just user folders
and files, it may work for you -if it does, your problem is solved.
But, if you need a robust, reliable, longterm solution that is part of
a comprehensive disaster recovery plan -which includes data security,
retention, and recoverability with reliability- that your business or
education institution would have to rely on for continued operation, TM
is simply not up to the task. Its lack of support for tape still means
that you have to rely on external USB or Firewire drives as your
primary backup medium. Yes, you could use an attached XServe RAID as
your TM disk, but you
still have to get that data off the RAID and onto another external
drive or onto tape -which, again,
TM does not support- so for long term storage, you need a solution that
supports tape. Yes, yes, one could write and maintain a script that
employs tar; but, with other more robust solutions out there, why would
you (Price
doesn't enter into the discussion because it costs you time and your
employer money for you to maintain it when you could be more productive
elsewhere)?
While disks are cheap, experience tells me that neither FW or USB
external enclosures are to be relied upon for a backup solution.
External enclosures with 'dongle' power supplies are too prone to
failure that can render both the controller in the enclosure and the
system they are attached to unusable in the event of failure. Higher
price does not equate to better quality -as even the best have gone
'up-in-smoke' and taken out expensive logic boards because of the cheap
components in the expensive shiny case.
If you need to use a solution that does support tape, it's also going
to support DTD backups, data deduplication, have extensive scheduling
capabilities, support for a large range of hardware and OSes (since
many of us work in a mixed platform environment), has extensive
notification capabilities, and comes with vendor/coder support that
carries some accountability -all of those are not going to be delivered
by TM. TM is an OS X-centric solution. If that's all you need, then
happy days. I, for one, will look elsewhere.
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