Home network backup solutions?

[Reid Rivenburgh]

On Feb 20, 2008 10:50 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Reid Rivenburgh wrote:
> > Hi.  I have a small network at home consisting of one wired, always-on
> > F8 desktop (mine), a roving Mac laptop running OS X, and a rarely-on
> > Windows XP laptop.  The laptops are wireless.  I also have a new 500
> > GB external hard drive that some of you may remember.  The Mac user
> > was thinking about getting a drive for herself to do backups using
> > Time Machine or whatever Apple's backup app is.  But we figured there
> > ought to be a way to backup to my desktop/hard drive.  I looked around
> > and found BackupPC.  It sounds like it'd do the job, if I could figure
> > it out.  (I'm having trouble discovering the Mac on the network
> > [doesn't respond to nmblookup], and I have a feeling if I can get past
> > that, I will have additional trouble getting rsync or tar to work
> > there....)  I thought I'd check here to see if there's anything else
> > out there that would work.  Ideally, it would be transparent to the
> > clients, automatic when they're on the network, incremental....  You
> > know, um, everything BackupPC does!  Free and open source would be
> > best....
>
> If it is your network you shouldn't have to 'discover' it. The simple
> fix is to configure your dhcp server to always give the same IP
> addresses to the same MAC addresses and then either put the addresses
> and names in the backuppc's hosts file or set up local DNS service.
> There shouldn't be any problem running ssh, rsync, or tar on a Mac.
> Many people on the backuppc mail list are backing up macs, so ask there
> if you run into any problems.

Thanks for the advice.  I have a wired/wireless Netgear router that's
configured to dole out IP addresses to the laptops (and tivos) via
DHCP.  It's always worked that way, and I never saw any reason to do
it differently before.  Hopefully it can be configured as you describe
or I may need to rethink the whole thing.  (I'm a networking novice,
really.)

While researching the Mac discovery issue, I saw some references to
various issues with handling Mac clients.  Things like Apple rsync
extensions, resource forks (?)... nothing insurmountable, I'm sure.

Sounds like you think I'm on the right track with BackupPC, though.
Thanks for the reply!

reid