Maybe I'm chasing a pipe dream here, but I'd really like to find an easy to use backup solution that supports both Windows and OS X, presumably something people never have to think about until the worst happens.
Suggestions?
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Are you talking about some sort of enterprise backup system that will work with both, or a home solution for a few pc's and macs?– Sam CoganApr 30, 2009 at 8:01
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For me, it's a small scale (think 20 PCs or less), but answers for larger enterprises will probably also be useful.– Brad WilsonApr 30, 2009 at 8:08
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9 Answers
I have been using Mozy on both OSX (primarly) and Windows for over a year now with few problems, including during testing of recovery. The biggest problem, which I don't think is solved by any backup solution, is the slowing of the computer caused by encoding or determining which files need to be backed up. Also, Mozy is very cheap and they have both enterprise (reasonable pricing) and personal backup solutions (especially cheap) There are other similar services out there now.
Another service that seems quite similar is Blackblaze. Similar pricing and services to that of Mozy.
answered Apr 30, 2009 at 8:09
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1I've used Backblaze for a while and am very happy with it.– user17642Aug 21, 2009 at 3:07
CrashPlan is terrific. I use it to back up several Macs and a Windows box to local/network disks and remote servers over the Internet (mine, not theirs). It easily supports multiple destinations per machine, does incremental backups forever, deduplication, compression, etc. Also, it'll do near-as-continuous backups (every couple of minutes, if you want) and handles strange network configurations seamlessly, which makes it a great fit for laptops.
Before CrashPlan I used a combination of Retrospect and Bacula. I really wouldn't recommend either, for different reasons. Both haven't made the transition from tape to disk backups, so you end up storing big sequential files on disk like tape, and still have to manually manage your backup generations, redo full backups and so forth. Of the two, Bacula, while a pain to set up, is considerably more reliable.
The only multi-machine mixed Mac OS X and Windows backup system I've used is Dantz Retrospect; Dantz was bought by EMC several years back, and Retrospect is still a living product.
My experience back in the late 1990s through early 2000s was that they provided a great incremental backup tool for multiple systems on a LAN. It did take them a release to shake out their Windows and Mac OS X support but once they did, I started hearing good things about their Windows backup solutions too.
Back in the early 2000s their Windows and Windows Server (including Exchange) backup support was good enough that it resulted in a department of a Very Large Company that I was doing some consulting for to switch to Retrospect. I was doing software development for them, not systems/network administration; it was the Windows people at their site who discovered and dove into Retrospect.
Windows Home Serer supports Backup of 10 PCs, so it's perfect for a Windows Office.
And didn't the last update add TimeMachine support for Mac?
answered Apr 30, 2009 at 9:11
Since you mentioned enterprise backup, I'll mention both Tivoli Storage Manager and Veritas NetBackup. Tivoli tends to be more IBM-centric whereas NetBackup pretty much has clients for just about everything.
NetBackup is painful to configure but once you get it working, it'll keep on going. I've implemented a system for a customer that was backing up over 48TB daily with over a 99+% success rate.
I have no idea about smaller systems =)
I used to use Mozy. but these days I'm using BackBlaze.
I found Mozy to be pretty flakey, and it used to hog my CPU a lot. I've found Backblaze to be competitive and less intrusive. In the end you need to give both solutions a try to find out which one works for you.
I'm using Jungledisk and have been extremely happy with it for data backup purposes, for OS backup I'm just Time Machine on my Mac and for Windows I'm prepared to reinstall if the worst happens.
On top of that, I'm using syncplicity to keep just my "work files" in sync between work/home/laptop machines.
I think you want something like this from Iron Mountain. It is centrally managed and they say they support PCs and Macs.
Unitrends has a great system for backing up your business computers/servers. They support most OSs. Master backups and BareMetal restores to dissimilar hardware in case something happens to your location. Might be a bit pricey at first glance, but there customer support is amazing and the system just works.