Home network backup solutions?

[Les Mikesell]

Reid Rivenburgh wrote:
> Hi.  I have a small network at home consisting of one wired, always-on
> F8 desktop (mine), a roving Mac laptop running OS X, and a rarely-on
> Windows XP laptop.  The laptops are wireless.  I also have a new 500
> GB external hard drive that some of you may remember.  The Mac user
> was thinking about getting a drive for herself to do backups using
> Time Machine or whatever Apple's backup app is.  But we figured there
> ought to be a way to backup to my desktop/hard drive.  I looked around
> and found BackupPC.  It sounds like it'd do the job, if I could figure
> it out.  (I'm having trouble discovering the Mac on the network
> [doesn't respond to nmblookup], and I have a feeling if I can get past
> that, I will have additional trouble getting rsync or tar to work
> there....)  I thought I'd check here to see if there's anything else
> out there that would work.  Ideally, it would be transparent to the
> clients, automatic when they're on the network, incremental....  You
> know, um, everything BackupPC does!  Free and open source would be
> best....

If it is your network you shouldn't have to 'discover' it. The simple 
fix is to configure your dhcp server to always give the same IP 
addresses to the same MAC addresses and then either put the addresses 
and names in the backuppc's hosts file or set up local DNS service. 
There shouldn't be any problem running ssh, rsync, or tar on a Mac. 
Many people on the backuppc mail list are backing up macs, so ask there 
if you run into any problems.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com