I received an interesting request today. Namely, is it possible to setup a networked Time Machine to backup the Desktops of 11 workstations on a LAN.
While I'm familiar with OSX, I haven't attempted to setup Time Machine until today.
I work with a group of professional photographers/videographers/graphic artists that regularly produce a large volume of products. They already have a large (ie 30+TB) NAS they use to archive old projects but there are cases where some deliverables were accidentally deleted prior to backup.
The Hardware:
- A Mac Mini loaded with Mavericks
- OSX Server
- 5TB of SAN
The Setup:
- Load OSX Server on the Mini
- Mount the SAN via iSCSI
- Partition the SAN with 2 Volumes, Storage & Backup with a 3:1 ratio
- Setup OSX to backup using Time Machine
- Create one folder for each workstations desktop on the Storage volume
- Share the Storage volume via SMB
Note: iSCSI allows the OS to transparently mount a networked SAN as a local disk.
On the workstations I'll create symbolic links to replace the user's local Desktop folder with the Desktop folder on the network drive.
Then, if a file is lost somebody can remote into the Mac Mini and wind back the Time Machine to recover any lost files.
The Mini will be dedicated to this and sharing printers alone so I don't think the backups will overwhelm the server. The SAN will be configured in a of Raid50 array with 2 drive redundancy. This setup will reside on a trusted, private, air-gapped network so security isn't an issue. All network connections are hard-wired.
Are there any special Time Machine quirks/limitations that I need to look out for before I invest the time and effort to build this beast?
Best Answer
I don't think you need to have one folder per workstation - each backup will be created in a .sparsebundle file, that is mounted by the remote workstation that belongs to it, and used as the backup disk.
At home I have a Mac Mini running OS X Server, and I also back up my MacBook Pro and my wife's MacBook Pro to it over WiFi. It works well, and apart from the size of the disk I imagine it would scale just fine.