Retrospect vs. time machine?

Question

Retrospect vs. time machine?

In connection to a recent question about a failed HD on our server in the office, I was talking with a friend who strongly urged me to dump Retrospect in favor of just using time machine. (note we don't actually run leopard right now, we would need to upgrade) I wanted to pose the question to the forum hear with our setup to see if anyone had any expert opinions before we move forward here.

Currently our office has 6 macs all running tiger and being backed up nightly to a dedicated 500gb drive on a Powermac G5 we use as a file server. Now, keep in mind, i didn't setup this server/backup configuration, i just happen to be in the office and am knowledgeable about how to fix it when it goes wrong. So problem one with this scenario is that the backups have no back up, and of course what went wrong recently is that this 500gb drive that Retrospect is writing to died. But more to the point of how to run a backup, my friend believes that when running backups in an office environment that is relatively low traffic/file size where everything is a mac, retrospect is overkill.

the problem with upgrading machines to leopard and running time machine seems that we would have to buy individual FW drives for each machine in the office as backing up across a network seems dodgy unless you use a time capsule. without a lot of in depth knowledge, Time machine seems mostly useful for needing to pull up a two week old version of a file which is something we don't really need.

All we need is a reliable and simple solution that is making regular backups of the machines in the office in case one of them dies a horrible death. i guess the heart of this question is, is using retrospect in an office where no one really knows what it is doing or how to ever retrieve files from it if a drive dies really helpful? would a more user friendly approach here be better? is it worth dumping and using time machine? if dumping it and using time machine what would be the drawbacks?

thanks.

powerbook G4 1.5Ghz 15", Mac OS X (10.4.11), 1.5gb RAM

Posted on Jul 7, 2009 12:27 PM

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Answer 1

thomas_r.

Level 7

32,031 points

Jul 7, 2009 1:02 PM in response to Pablo de ocampo

The problem with using Time Machine in your current setup is that each individual machine becomes responsible for its own backups, and each machine must have its own volume somewhere on which to store those backups. So, you're going to need not one new drive, but six... or a big enough drive that you can partition it into six volumes. These volumes will need to be either accessible over the network, and each person will need to connect to those volumes to ensure the backups happen and disconnect before taking any laptops outside the network, or they'll need to be sitting on each person's desk, with the same gotchas. Also, to give you some idea of how large the volumes need to be, Time Machine volumes should be about 2-3 times larger than the data they are backing up. All in all, not the ideal small business backup system, unless you're okay with saying "Well, Bob, you didn't follow our backup procedures, so all the data you just lost is your problem." That's probably not a viable philosophy in a small business, where the lost data is probably everyone's problem.

I would not consider Retrospect overkill, in fact it seems ideally suited for this purpose. I've been trying to talk my wife into buying it for her small business, but no luck so far... 😟 It's been a long time since I've used it, though, and I've heard that the latest versions are unreliable. If it's working okay for you, though, I wouldn't worry about that.

As for the issue of retrieving files... if nobody there knows how to get files out of the backup, that reduces the usefulness of the backup. Someone needs to learn how. If nobody does, of course, you'll have a wonderful motivator the next time someone needs a file retrieved... Just say that whoever loses data first has to learn how to do it! 🙂

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Answer 2

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Jul 7, 2009 1:06 PM in response to Pablo de ocampo

Pablo de ocampo wrote:
. . .
we would have to buy individual FW drives for each machine in the office as backing up across a network seems dodgy unless you use a time capsule.

TM will back up over a network, to a drive attached to a Mac running OSX Leopard Server: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1733

V.K., Kappy, or others can shed more light on just how to configure this, as I haven't done it.

So problem one with this scenario is that the backups have no back up,

That's something separate, that you could deal with in a couple of ways.

One is, you could "duplicate" the TM drive via the Restore tab of Disk Utility, or SuperDuper!, and take the duplicate off-site.

Ordinarily, though, backing-up a backup isn't the best strategy, as anything wrong with the primary backup would be copied to the secondary.

It would take a bit of coordination, but you could back up to one disk for a period, then take it to a secure off-site location and swap for a second one. Both sets would be separate and independent. You would have to do a +Change Disk+ in TM's Preferences on each Mac. There may be a way to bypass the +Change Disk,+ but I'm not certain it really works properly, so don't recommend it. I'd be happy to help you test it, if you want, as I'd like to know.

Time machine seems mostly useful for needing to pull up a two week old version of a file which is something we don't really need.

Really? Nobody ever changes or deletes a file in error? Nothing ever gets corrupted?

That is one of the major advantages of Time Machine, especially if you let it do it's hourly incremental backups; if you really, really don't want that, then TM may not be the best app for your situation.

If you haven't yet, you might want to review this Time Machine Tutorial

and this: Time Machine Features

and perhaps the Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions post at the top of this forum.

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Answer 3

Jul 7, 2009 1:10 PM in response to Pablo de ocampo

Retrospect is a very powerful, flexible backup system, which has been in operation for many years. Unfortunately, that flexibility tends to translate to complexity at the administration level, so it's a lot less straightforward to set up and administer than Time Machine. However, as you've already mentioned, its strengths include network backup. This gives you a central point of administration, and prevents users getting in the way of the backups (by disconnecting a local TM drive, changing settings, incorrectly restoring files, etc).

Another strength that you don't seem to be using at your setup is the ability to run backups across multiple sets, swapped on a regular basis. That is, rather than having a single backup drive, you have several. You have one script which runs on Monday night; on Tuesday morning you swap out the Monday drive for the Tuesday drive, and the Tuesday script runs that night. And so on. You customize it for your own situation: how much data you can afford to lose, and how much work/cost is involved in rotating the backups. This also gives you the possibility of getting backups offsite, a plus for ANY backup system, but a process which would be a painful operation with TM.

I've used Retrospect up to version 6.1. There's a newer version now which is supposedly more Mac-like. The older editions always had odd conventions and definitely had their share of frustrating features, but certainly pays back research and thorough reading of the documentation.

Matt

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Answer 4

Kappy

Level 10

362,007 points

Jul 7, 2009 1:11 PM in response to Pablo de ocampo

Describe precisely what the physical backup setup would be. If you don't wish to have a network backup solution (would not have to be Time Machine/Time Capsule) then will you simply provide a backup drive for each user's computer? What do you desire your backup strategy to involve? Are there data security issues, long-term archival needs, backup redundancy requirements, should the backups be distributed or centralized, what are the potential storage size needs? As for backup software that should wait until the actual strategic needs have been defined.

Note that the current setup, if it's working in general, may not require any major change other than storage needs, issues of backup security and redundancy, and the best software for meeting your needs.

Note that Time Machine is intended mostly as an individual user backup solution. Although it may be used in an office environment it may not be the best solution for that environment. Incremental archival backup can be accomplished with other backup utilities including Retrospect.

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Answer 5

Jul 7, 2009 1:44 PM in response to Kappy

As it stands now, the physical back up setup is that all six machines in the office are backed up nightly to a drive on a powermac G5 that acts as a fileserver and runs some server based applications like the filemaker databases. while all the machines are backed up to that drive, that drive has no backup solution.

So we have two problems that need to get addressed. One is that the current backup software solution, retrospect, seems to generally do what it is supposed to do, but whenever anything goes wrong, no one knows how to use it. the other is that our entire offices back up sets were being written to one drive and one drive only and that drive had no backup plan.

What i am aiming to do is the simplest and most affordable solution. it was suggested by a friend that upgrading to leopard and using time machine would be really simple and a no brainer. we'd still have to learn TM, but that would be easier than retrospect. We'd then either have each machine backing up to its own external FW drive OR use leopard server to have all the machines backing up to a very large partitioned drive on the server. A network solution is preferable as external drives on everyones desks seems like it would get messy fast. if going with the network solution, i suppose we would then use another large drive to externally clone those backup sets from time to time, though it sounds like there would be the option as Matt suggested to have retrospect just back up to different drives on alternating days.

but issues like data security and off site storage are not a huge issue. its just there to keep us safe if there is a hd failure on someone's machine. Beyond everyone's system files, i would say most people are keeping something like 10-12gb of data on their machine locally, while the file server has about 35-40gb.

At the end of the day, someone (read: me) needs to learn either retrospect or time machine. retrospect is here already, and more or less works. i think most of the complications it has had in the past couple of manoths had to do with the HD it was writing to starting to fail, which would then cause the backup routine to fail. I was starting to think time machine might just be easier to learn, which i think is why my friend suggested it, but based on what i have read so far it might cause as many problems as it solves.

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Answer 6

Kappy

Level 10

362,007 points

Jul 7, 2009 3:18 PM in response to Pablo de ocampo

Here's the deal with TM. All users can maintain there own individual machine backups to the shared drive, but that drive needs to have at least twice the capacity of the sum of all the drive capacities that will be backed up. If each computer has a 100 GB hard drive, then 6 computers require 1.2 TBs of storage space for the TM backup drive (6 x 100GBs x2) at a minimum.

Non-TM solutions would require half the space required for TM provided backups are non-archival - old files are simply replaced by new ones at each backup. Furthermore, TM backs up every hour. It is not suited to a "once per day" backup schedule. Retrospect is better suited for that. Note that there are other backup utilities you could use instead of Retrospect:

Backup Software Recommendations

1. Retrospect Desktop (Commercial)
2. Synchronize! Pro X (Commercial)
3. Synk (Backup, Standard, or Pro)
4. Deja Vu (Shareware)
5. Carbon Copy Cloner (Donationware)
6. SuperDuper! (Commercial)
7. Intego Personal Backup (Commercial)
8. Data Backup (Commercial)
9. SilverKeeper 2.0 (Freeware)
10. Tri-Backup (Commercial)

Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files.

All of the above including Retrospect are capable making bootable clones and doing scheduled backups (full and incremental) at the schedule of your choice (once daily or less or more frequently.) All (excluding Retrospect) have relatively easy to use and understand user interfaces. However, except for Retrospect they would require partitioning the backup drive so that each user would backup to their own respective backup partition. They are not suited to creating multiple and independent machine backups on a single large backup volume.

I do not know what your maximum storage requirements might be and if you should replace the backup drive you are now using with a larger drive. However, you can provide some redundancy to your hardware by pairing two backup drives (in a single enclosure) into a mirrored RAID. A mirrored RAID uses two drives each of which is a replica of the other. All data written to one drive is automatically mirrored on the other drive. This protects your backup in the event of a drive failure. Although one drive is a backup of the other, a mirrored RAID does not eliminate the need for a way to backup the backup. That may be done with either one large drive to which you backup the backup drive (or mirrored RAID) or a second mirrored RAID. This provides both backup protection and redundancy to help prevent data loss. I use a scheme like this. My main startup volume is backed up daily to a mirrored RAID. Once per week I make a backup of the mirrored RAID to another single backup drive. A good friend of mine does something similar to me but once per month he backs up to a third backup drive. That drive is then stored off-site until the next monthly backup. He does this to avoid loss of data due to theft, vandalism, fire, etc.

RAID Basics

For basic definitions and discussion of what a RAID is and the different types of RAIDs see RAIDs. Additional discussions plus advantages and disadvantages of RAIDs and different RAID arrays see:

RAID Tutorial;
RAID Array and Server: Hardware and Service Comparison>.

Hardware or Software RAID?

RAID Hardware Vs RAID Software - What is your best option?

RAID is a method of combining multiple disk drives into a single entity in order to improve the overall performance and reliability of your system. The different options for combining the disks are referred to as RAID levels. There are several different levels of RAID available depending on the needs of your system. One of the options available to you is whether you should use a Hardware RAID solution or a Software RAID solution.

RAID Hardware is always a disk controller to which you can cable up the disk drives. RAID Software is a set of kernel modules coupled together with management utilities that implement RAID in Software and require no additional hardware.

Pros and cons

Software RAID is more flexible than Hardware RAID. Software RAID is also considerably less expensive. On the other hand, a Software RAID system requires more CPU cycles and power to run well than a comparable Hardware RAID System. Also, because Software RAID operates on a partition by partition basis where a number of individual disk partitions are grouped together as opposed to Hardware RAID systems which generally group together entire disk drives, Software RAID tends be slightly more complicated to run. This is because it has more available configurations and options. An added benefit to the slightly more expensive Hardware RAID solution is that many Hardware RAID systems incorporate features that are specialized for optimizing the performance of your system.

For more detailed information on the differences between Software RAID and Hardware RAID you may want to read: Hardware RAID vs. Software RAID: Which Implementation is Best for my Application?

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Answer 7

Jul 7, 2009 9:43 PM in response to Kappy

thanks for this. it was really helpful and though i still have some reading to do, i think sticking with the retrospect as the software solution is the way to go. time machine is appealing for a number of reasons, but i think on the hardware end, it requires a lot of upgrades (either through individual external HDs for each machine or a huge storage upgrade on the server end).

Hardware solution still needs to be sorted out, but thats easier in a way. If i decide on keeping the retrospect as the back up plan, i have a lot of options, from external FW drives, to RAID striped external drives, to NAS drives.

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