PineRidge said:
My tape back-up has become unstable and stalls in the middle of a back-up job. This has made a replacement solution necessary. Does anyone here have experience with the Maxtor One-Touch II external drive back-up? I understand they are much quicker to use than a tape drive unit and have faster seek times.
Can 3 separate machines, all running XP be backed up via network to a single Maxtor (providing the Maxtor capacity is large enough to support all 3 hard drives)
PineRidge,
First off I want to say that I am impressed that you recognize the importance of backups and are are seeking out an AUTOMATED solution.
I have a Maxtor One-Touch I. I don't really use any of the software which came bundled with it. The device is nothing more then a regular Hard Disk Drive in a Firewire/USB2 Enclosure. You can build your own if you wish by purchasing a Firewire or USB2 enclosure and putting in your own hard drive. The bundled backup software which comes with the Maxtor and other products is not enough if you wish to perform "automated" backups over the network. At least that was my experience. The version tha came with mine was for personal backup only (i.e. just the computer it is attached to).
If you wish to perform Automated backups over the network then you will need something like Retrospect by EMC Dantz software. I am not sure which Restrospect version will do what you want they have changed the marketing terms so many times that I have lost track. But the Retrospect that used (or is still) come bundled with the Maxtor One-Touch is for one PC only.. not for network backup.
Anyhow, I don't use any commercial backup software but instead use the Unix tool Rsync and format the volume on the Maxtor drive as a Unix Filesystem. More specificaly, Mac OS X Extended Journeled file sytem which allows me to backup Macs, Linux/*BSD, Windows files. I use the "linkdir" feature of Rsync to allow me to create complete daily and weekly snapshots of all the machine that I am backing up without re-backing up the files that have NOT changed and wasting diskspace.
For Unix geeks. recall that on a Unix filesystem you are able to do "hard links" of files so the file can appear in multiple locations in filesystem but only is actually stored once on your disk. The linkdir feature of rsync lets you create many backups into seperate directories on the HDD which "appear" to be a complete copy of the directory structure you have backed up but yet most all the files are hard links to the same file. If the file has changed then the new back actually does the copy. If not then the new backup for that day will hard link the file. This avoids needless backups, speeds up the backup, and allows you to quick view the backups as live filesystems. As your backup is only as good as the last time you made the backup, using this rsync technique it is possible to perform a daily backup and still be able to go back far enough in time to catch files that you have changed or deleted a long time ago.
I actually have 2 backup jobs.. running.. a Daily which keeps the last 6 days and a weekly which basically snapshots on a weekly basis. weekly linkdir between other weeklys, dailys linkdir between daily. The daily and weekly is a rotating scheme. For example, the daily only keeps the last 6 days and the weekly only keeps the last 51 weeks.
