# Backup Windows PCs across network to my Mac?



## hhk (May 31, 2006)

I'm trying to come up with a good backup scheme for my mixed Mac and Windows environment. I have a number of large external drives. I'd rather not move them physically around the house.

I'm wondering, if I use SuperDuper, can I leave the drives attached to my Mac and backup the data files on my Windows PCs across the network? I would do this unattended at night, of course.

If I do this, is it best to format the entire drive HFS?

Can anyone see any potential pitfalls with this scheme before I dive into it?


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## An Old Soul (Apr 24, 2006)

I don't know of any method by which you can back up Windows AND Mac systems on the same drive, let alone from one another.

Windows PC's can't even read the partition format of Macs without the addition of software, and unless it's via networking, with your macs having Windows sharing enabled, can't files can't be read either.

SuperDuper! will not read anything but Mac installations, but I do know of a PC program that will do what SuperDuper! does for your PCs.

Unattended backups are a good idea, and as long as your network is wired I'd say for it. If you've got large drives, wireless, even at 54Mbps will not cut it, unless you've done the original backups wired, and are just doing incremental backups wireless.

Keep in mind for your macs, you'll need to have the drives mounted in the finder to access them for remote backups.

My recommendation would be to have at least two drives, one for each platform, and set them up over the network for backups after doing the first backup with each computer directly connected to the respective backup drive.

Make sure that the drives are available over the network for backup, on the Mac side this means that you should set the drive as mounted in the user preferences startup pane. This way each Mac will mount the network drive on every boot, ensuring that it's available to SuperDuper!

Leave more time for the computers whose contents have most changed daily, placing them at the end of the backup routine.

Good luck!


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## Guest (Dec 6, 2006)

I do much the same sort of thing at my Girlfriend's place for her, this is what I do...

On the mac I setup an alias from the external drive I want to backup to in the home directory of the mac user (the one you will you to authenticate from the windows machine). Let's call it "external"

On the windows box, "map" the network drive from the mac. I call it the M: drive (for Mac  )

On the windows box I use XCOPY to backup the entire user's folder to the M: drive. I don't have the scripts accessible now, but I know I used about 5-6 switches on it (do XCOPY /? to see the options).

Setup this script with the windows scheduler to run nightly at a chosen time.

HTH


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## Guest (Dec 6, 2006)

Also just to note, if you're looking for a full system backup from windows the method I describe above is not a good choice... I'm not aware of any easy way to do a full windows system backup to a networked drive (at least not without commercial software).


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## gordguide (Jan 13, 2001)

You might find that file name issues prevent good backups across Windows and UNIX or OSX platforms.

If you can zip the files you want to backup (or otherwise compress or archive them; eg .tar), and keep those filenames x-platform compatible, you can avoid a lot of issues that typically are difficult to prevent and usually show up at the worst possible time.


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## Guest (Dec 6, 2006)

I haven't seen any of these problems gord ... just to note that Apple's built in SMB sharing takes care of that for you on the fly by substituting illegals.


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## madgunde (Mar 10, 2006)

EMC Retrospect for Mac will do what you want. It backs up Windows, Mac and Linux clients.

What's nice is it works regardless of whether the backup server or clients are logged in. The computers just have to be on. Works pretty well, I use it to back up all the Macs on my home network. A little bit of a learning curve, but very powerful. Client software is free so you only have to buy one copy for the backup server.


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## Guest (Dec 6, 2006)

Retrospect is nutorious for losing data and not being able to restore it properly. Also unless they have changed their licensing this year the clients are not free. The backup server comes with 5 clients last time I checked.

I've pesonally seen Retrospect "lose" -- unrecoverablty -- 8TB of data within a 2 week period. I'd strongly reccomend to avoid it if you value your data.

madgunde: Have you tried to do a full restore of your data lately?


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## madgunde (Mar 10, 2006)

I've never had a problem doing a restore. Haven't done a full restore lately, but I have done so in the past. Whenever I've needed to restore a file or files, it's always been there for me.


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## Guest (Dec 6, 2006)

hehe I might direct you to the Dantz/EMC forums then 

Also a very very important part of the backup procedure is testing fullr estores regularly. The worst thing imagnable is when you try to restore data and it just fails with no errors. This is exactly what Retrospect has done to me many many times.

I even had quite a few phone calls with their lead developer in order to try and resolve the issues. In the end he upgraded us from 5.x to 6.x for free. When we had the exact same issues with 6.x he had no suggestions and was trying to talk to his accounting dept about giving us a full refund (which never happened).


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## gordguide (Jan 13, 2001)

" ... just to note that Apple's built in SMB sharing takes care of that for you on the fly by substituting illegals. ..."

Going one way, with substitution, is rarely the problem. It's restoring from those files when the OS or an application wants a specific pathname and can't find it (because renaming changed it).

Nor is that the only pitfall you might run across; Windows pathnames (which include the file name and it's entire path in the 255 character limit) versus OSX file names (where a file can have a long file name and reside inside a folder with a long directory name, and these may be nested inside many other folders with long directory names, for an extreme example); case sensitivity issues; nested folder limits differ between the two, etc.

These things only rear their head when an empty folder is found where your backup files are supposed to be. Even some OSX applications, which we might think of as a single example.app but really is many nested files, can be difficult to keep intact if it gets moved to a NTFS file system that happens to be a little deeper than the root level of the drive.

It does depend on what, exactly, you're backing up. You have far fewer problems if you are just moving files than if you are trying to backup an archive of nested files and folders that you expect to restore as they were.

Any compression scheme takes care of these issues, provided you decompress in the native environment (ie unzip your Windows files on Windows). It's always better to not have to learn these limits the hard way, when it might be too late. You can certainly backup across platforms without resorting to compression, but don't assume all is well unless you have tested your methods.


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## Kosh (May 27, 2002)

I tend to use the duplicate feature of Dantz's retrospect for backups, that way I can view all the files/folders in my "backup". It also allows me to just drag and drop items that I want to recover. But I have been meaning to check out Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner, as they certainly be cheaper alternatives. I just wonder if they would be as fast or faster. I don't like backups which create a single file backup.


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## madgunde (Mar 10, 2006)

mguertin said:


> hehe I might direct you to the Dantz/EMC forums then


You could say the same thing about Apple, but I doubt you would tell people not to touch a Mac because lots of people have problems with them. Not everyone has problems with Retrospect. Just because you do, does not mean hhk or someone else will. There just isn't any other backup solution that does the job that Retrospect does. If you're paranoid about the integrity of the backups, then use the file duplication function as Kosh suggested.

I use a combination of backup styles depending on what the data is. I use file duplication to backup my iTunes and iPhoto Libaries from my MacBook Pro to my G4 tower and my wife's MacBook. I use incremental backup to backup our home folders to a spare hard disk on my G4 tower. The reason I use incremental for our personal files is it allows you to go back to an older version of a file and restore it.

Retrospect is a very robust solution that can handle a lot of different kinds of backup routines. It's served me well for a few years now. I would recommend it to anyone who has complex network backup needs. But keep in mind it isn't the most user friendly application. You will need to spend a bit of time learning all its options.


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## hhk (May 31, 2006)

I think I'm going to go with a hybrid scheme. One reason why I want to mount the drives to my Mac and backup my Windows machines across the network is I don't want to dick around with Win32 file system. I don't want the file and drive size restrictions that come with it.

I think I will format HFS, attach to my Mac. I will then use SuperDuper to manage full backups of my Mac and as suggested here, set up an alias for my Windows machines to just copy essential data. If the Windows HDs die, I can rebuild easily enough (I've done it so many times), I think I can live without a full system backup.


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