I have several users on my network and I use my server to manage their home directories on our RAID disk farm.
Is it possible to have time machine backup their home directories data?
I've had the official answer from an Apple Certified Sys Admin - basically if the user profile is local to the machine being backed up, it's included. If it's purely a network account, it doesn't (the theory being that the user accounts are being backed up on the server anyway).
You could do it the way Jaydisc and Tibor have suggested, but in actual fact the best way would be as follows:
Use Mobile Home directories - that way the user account is stored both on the server, and on the local machine. Effectively that gets around the problem of different instances of data if the user logs onto different machines - because the profile can be synchronised between the server and the local machine at logon, so the locally stored profile would always be up to date and thus TM could be employed. Yes, you would still back up the entire machine, not just the user account, but at least you could back up the user account.
The only thing to remember in this case is that TM is only as good as your last sync - there are settings available in WGM to tell it to sync the profile every x minutes, and since TM only runs every hour, as long as it's running shortly after your last profile sync, things will work as planned.
Again, there are downsides to having Mobile Home Directories (i.e. if you have a lot of users hot-desking, the chances are you could fill your local machine hard drives quickly), but in a normal SMB environment where users normally sit at the same desk, or you only have a small number of users that hot-desk, then it's a good answer.
I now understand that you cannot use TM for network users. I think that Apple's answer is insufficient because the whole purpose of TM was to make backup easy, so why not making it easy to network users too.
Syncing the home directories is not an option because of two main reasons:
1. Some of the users data is on share points and not in their home directories.
2. The amount of data is much bigger than any desktop station (we have 7 tera byte of data on our data farm connected to the server. Out of it I would like to have 500MB backup using TM).
Ziv, I agree - I think it's a poor solution for network users.
I understand the point you make about the user data being on sharepoints and not in their home directories - but you're never going to have a single backup instance that captures both the entire user home folder AND selected shared files or folders. I can't see why someone would ever design it because the likelihood is that you could be in a position where you could be backing up the same piece of data multiple times for different users, rather than once for the whole server.
User home folders is a different matter - there is a very good argument for wanting the users to have a simple restore solution for individual files and folders and it's a shame that Time Machine doesn't have that option - or at least not in the way you describe.
I don't see why mobile accounts wouldn't solve your problem - the 7 TB of data you mention isn't 7TB of user profiles - it must be 99% shared data, surely? All you have to worry about is whether the total amount of data in the /Users/ folder on the server is greater than the total amount of hard drive space available on each client computer (because you could in theory have all users eventually having logged on to one machine, thus saving every profile locally on that machine). If the total volume of /Users/ IS greater than the total spare hard drive space on each client machine, then yes, you're right, it wouldn't work.
Anyway, don't dismiss it out of hand - give it a go on a trial machine (or your own) - you never know, it might actually be more useful than you thought. Let us know how you get on if you decide to try it. I'm going to have a go now.
Thank you for your respond. Let me explain a little bit more about our data structure and why I don't see how TM on mobile account can help.
We have about 10 users each has its own home directory with its docs (about 200MB). Apart from that we have about 300MB which are shared between users and are mounted as share points and only the users have permissions to read/write to them. In order for us to work with TM we MUST backup both the users home directories and the share points.
As far as I understand Apple does not give a solution to backup, using TM, any network resource and I think we better look for a different solution.
One thing you can do, is make a new share that the users have access to.
Then you can run an rsync script every night to copy the data from either/both their homes and the shared storage onto that share. (Ditto command would work as well.)
(You can use cron to schedule rsync or ditto.)
(I do that too, in adittion to TM)
That way, if people needed something recovered from last night, they can log onto that share and grab it. You can also keep daily backups in properly named folders.
Ziv, sorry, I didn't understand you properly. You're right, TM should never be used on its own as the only backup solution you have unless you are a home user with only one or two machines.
The way I want to use it is as a convenient extra, so that the users can look after restoring their own occasional lost files and folders while I take care of the proper Disaster Recovery. The trouble I have is that our corporate-level backup policy is disk staging - i.e. disk to disk to tape. So if I want to restore a lost file from last week, say, I have to find the relevant tape from last week, restore to disk, and then restore from that disk back into the operating system, which is a **** of lengthy procedure for restoring a single file. So in my case, TM on mobile accounts answers the question quite neatly (I say 'quite' because I would rather have it working to back up just one instance of each user account, but that's not possible).
However, I definitely wouldn't use it as my only coporate backup strategy. As Tibor says, there are other ways of doing it, and it all depends on how much you have to spend as a company on backup solutions and how confident (and bothered) you are with regard to writing scripts to copy stuff around.
So to sum it all up, Ziv, you're right, lol, it wouldn't work in the way you want it to and you're going to have to find another way. Sorry for dragging that out longer than it should have been.
