Hey everyone! The backup solution that we are currently running is managed Time Machine through a Mac Mini that connects to a NAS with RAID.
The problem that we are running into as of late, as that as our staff is growing (quite fast now), we are having a very hard time with performance trying to push the amount of data through a 1Gb network connection to the Mac Mini.
We have a staff of around 120 now that we need to back up. What solutions are y’all running that y’all might recommend? I remember back in the day we ran CrashPlan and that was NOT a fun experience (and I think I read where its no longer available anyways).
That is one solution that we are looking at… specifically creating SymLinks on the macs to mimic the document folders and direct it to OneDrive… it’s just a smidge archaic.
CALEB STANLEY
Network Specialist
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Good news! There’s a new Mac mini with 10 Gigabit Ethernet!
All snark aside, you’re probably right in thinking it’s time to move to a file-based backup. OneDrive is an option if you want your users to be responsible for it, and unfortunately CrashPlan has pretty much priced themselves out of the ballgame for new licensees.
As far as on-prem solutions go, I’m a fan of Retrospect as it’s got plenty of features and is priced pretty well for workstation backup. It’s a bit quirky to set up and use, but once it’s running it’s fine.
I don’t know if I’d trust the stability of symlinks with OneDrive… we train the users “want it backed up? It goes here. Spill coffee on your machine and it’s not there? We can’t help you”, and regardless of whether they heed our advice, they all know that’s the case.
Yeah, that’s the mentality that I would LIKE to adopt… but there has been a little bit of push back, specifically around data retention… because we had a situation where a departing staff member wiped their computer before handing it over to IT… with OneDrive, I know we have some tools to combat that, but it’s a matter of how to we force users to utilize OneDrive… all conversations I’m planning on having with leadership.
I think for us, it’s less of an issue, because if it’s any data others already need, it’s on the “shared drive” (whatever form that takes). So even if someone tried to keep their data, the versioning on the shared drive would be enough for us to recover. We are actually the ones that end up wiping machines. Person left, time to redeploy? Great, wipe it!
Yeah, we have actually started utilizing SharePoint for the shared drive solution… so we may need to address our strategy around that… because the versioning capabilities have already helped us out so much. IT are the ones that ARE SUPPOSED to be the ones wiping the machines… and most people are good about just handing them over to us… we have just gotten burned in the past and we want to make sure that doesn’t happen again.