In a perfect world all company documents would be stored on a centralized file server/intranet that is backed up, easily restored and safe. Does this sound like your environment?
Yeah mine neither.
People keep them, in our case, on their laptops, so we have to provide a way to backup this data. For the longest time, we used an OS X server, and the mobile home directory sync service to “accomplish” this. It was a disaster; we had lots of problems with lost files, corrupt files, and people just not backing up.
Then Time Machine came out, and someone had a great idea…
“Why don’t we just buy hard drives for everyone?”
So, that’s what we did, and it’s what we do to this day. When you start working with North Point, you are given a 500 GB external hard drive, and we configure Time Machine to backup for you. We don’t provide bus powered drives, hoping this will dissuade people from taking them home, and if a user needs something bigger than 500GB, we are usually able to accommodate.
Since we use Casper Suite for our software deployment and inventory management, we asked them to provide a mechanism to tell us Time Machine’s last backup date. This enables us to pull a report and visit those users whose Time Machine is either broken, mis-configured, or just not turned on.
While this may seem like killing a gnat with a shotgun to some people, it makes total sense to us. Buying these external, non bus powered drives in bulk is more reasonable than you might think. The hard drives are rotated/re-purchased every three years just like our laptops, so we just bundle it with the total cost of the laptop. Also, it prevents us from having to buy big bad storage arrays to store all of the data. Additionally, it saves us the time/money to keep a storage array up and running and backed up to tape. Granted, it also doesn’t give us the same peace of mind an enterprise backup system would provide, but this is something we have been comfortable with for now in this area.
What are you using to backup your end users laptops/desktops?
March 16th, 2010 at 11:35 am
Smart. I wonder if a airport extreme + timemachine + drobopro might be an option also?
–DW
March 16th, 2010 at 12:57 pm
That seems like a great idea. Do you worry about off-site storage of users files?
March 16th, 2010 at 2:38 pm
I am not storing any data off-site.
March 21st, 2010 at 10:19 am
Thanks again Ryan for making this so simple. We plan to move in this direction over the next few months. We have also started sending a Time Capsule home with senior executives who don’t come on campus often and who are unlikely to do their own backups.
February 9th, 2011 at 8:13 pm
I use CrashPlan Pro… I am very intrigued by the fact that NP standardized on Time Machine– it’s so… home grade.
February 10th, 2011 at 9:28 am
You would be surprised.
This solution made the most sense when we made the decision. It put the responsibility and capability in the hands of the users. It has worked out really well for us.