[MW Forums]

You can make your life easier—and keep your data safer—by setting up an old Mac or a Mac mini as a backup server. It’ll do all the heavy lifting of backing up every computer regularly, without requiring your constant assistance. Joe Kissell shows you how to turn a Mac into a dedicated server for backups. more

[boulder1259]

You might want to be careful in your use of the word "server".
If you make the backup machine a true server (i.e., install Mac OS X Server on it), you'lll soon find that Retrospect Desktop no longer works. Unfotunately, EMC Dantz purposefully cripples Retrospect Desktop so that you're forced to buy the server version of Retrospect (much, much more expensive...). However, as long as the backup machine is only a Mac OS X client, everything will work fine.
To date, Dantz's software is the only one that I've found crippled in this manner. Hopefully someday they'll change this...

[lucentio]

I have pretty much exactly the setup you've described, using a Powerbook G3 333 as the server and iTunes server, with Retrospect. I can say that even with the slow processor under 10.3 it still works very well. we use it to backup a PB G4 80gb and an iBook G3 30 gb.
One thing, though - Retrospect does not allow you to set up a limit to the number of days backward you want to save information. It stupidly just keeps going until the drive is full. Then you have to do a Recycle Backup - which means copying over EVERYTHING all over again, which is damn slow, especially on the iBook's 802.11b. I recommend avoiding Retrospect until they fix this feature. The best part of Retrospect is the Server, but you can't run even a duplicate script from the server, only incremental archives. So you might as well use something free like Backup.

[Lectrick]

I stopped at the word "Retrospect". While this was a once-great Mac backup tool, I believe that in Tiger, a large amount of its functionality is replaced by one-liner Rsync (which now does resource forks!) commands scheduled via Cron. Here's an example entry from my /private/etc/crontab file (best utility to manage these is Cronnix):
0 4 3 root /usr/bin/rsync -a --delete --partial --extended-attributes --exclude "/." --exclude "/dev/" --exclude "/Desktop" --exclude "/Volume" --exclude "/Network" --exclude "/private/var/vm/" --exclude "/private/var/tmp/" --exclude "/private/tmp/*" / /Volumes/Backup/
This one-liner does a diff backup once a week every Wednesday at 3am of my root drive to my Backup drive, excluding a bunch of directories that are not necessary (I could have also referred to an "exclusion file" instead). Note that it does not preserve deleted files as the aforementioned Retrospect method does, but there are ways http://www.mikerubel...sync_snapshots/ of using Rsync to do this. Also, with a few tweaks Rsync will backup to another machine on the network. Here's my one-liner to backup my Windows home directory on my work laptop (which I installed Cygwin on to get access to Unix utilities) to my home Mac:
rsync -avzP --exclude-from="/cygdrive/c/cygwin/etc/excludelist" --delete-excluded /cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/myworkusername mydynamicip.dyndns.org:/Users/myhomeusername/Desktop/workbackup/
This is great. Using a separate excludelist file for exclusions (such as IE temp files, etc.) it sets up a diff backup over a compressed, encrypted connection (it asks me the password to my home machine), only sending differences, of my work files to a directory on my home machine, from anywhere on the Internet. (The files are stored unencrypted and not compressed, it's just the transmission that benefits from such.) It works much faster than the "corporate" Windows backup solution promulgated by IT here... ::cough:: Tivoli ::cough::
If you are a do-it-yourselfer, check out "man rsync" in the Terminal for more info.
I will consider making a GUI to take advantage of this great functionality in a more user-friendly way, as I know a bit of Cocoa...

[b1587be]

In reply to:

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I stopped at the word "Retrospect". While this was a once-great Mac backup tool

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Yes, just read what frustrated users (me being one of them) write about it e.g. in VersionTracker.
For those who don't use Tiger or don't want to get in direct contact with command line, I can recommend ChronoSync
from http://www.econtechnologies.com/ . It's inexpensive, works as advertised (set once on three Macs here, runs forever), and is highly flexible.

[cmuger]

I choose not to subject my clients to the world of Retrospect.
Instead I have been installing ChronoSync($30.00)
It just works. Sends email with a report and is very flexible.

[bici]

Wel lthx on the heads-up over Retrospect. I will look into ChronoSync .. .what about Synk 6 from Deciums??
and my other point: is that the author has left out on how we set=up the server or second machine???

What You Need
The Mac For this project, youll need a Mac with FireWire or USB 2.0 ports, at least 256MB of RAM, and X 10.1.5 or later. This Mac (and the other machines) will need a network connection. An AirPort network will work, but for faster backups, connect the computers to a wired Ethernet switch or hub.
*
So how do we set-up???