Nas for Mac Mini Server Backup?

lumencreative

lumencreative

lumencreative

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19 May 2014
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Have finally decided on going down the Mac Mini server route for our office and I'm now looking for a backup solution.

The plan is, the Mac Mini server will act as a file server and time machine backup for two - four macs in the office. I also want to be able to use as an ftp server to backup our web servers.

I then want to backup the Mac Mini server to an external drive which will then sync with something like Acronis Cloud via Acronis True Image or Microsoft OneDrive, etc.

Is it worth getting something like a Qnap NAS drive or should I go with a bog standard USB drive like the WD MyBook?
 
Surprised nobody else has replied to this!

I've just seen your other thread, firstly, as they said in there, don't run your own email solution. There are other companies (i.e. Google) who can provide a far more powerful service with longer guaranteed uptime at a fraction of the cost (and even then, better) than you'd be able to do yourself.

Ultimately it depends on how critical your data is, and whether you feel the extra cost is warranted. The main advantage of having a NAS doing its own cloud syncing is that if the Mac mini fails after a local backup, you're still going to have a device syncing to the cloud independently. That's a pretty specific scenario however.

The biggest concern will be Time Machine. For backups to an external drive, Time Machine won't use sparse bundles, but for network backups it will. This means that when it comes to backing up the backups for each machine, you'll be backing up the entire image and not individual files, no matter what solution you use to backup the server (what a horrible sentence!). You won't want to implement an unsupported, "hacked up" solution in a work environment, and TM isn't the most reliable, so you'd ideally want to find an alternative.

Best bet would be to find a solution that backs up using individual files (like TM does to an external drive). How fast is your connection and how frequently will you run the backups? If you've got a fast connection and you perform hourly or half-hourly incremental backups, you might as well just sync your backups straight to the cloud using the Mac mini. Otherwise, you could use a NAS and backup to the cloud nightly (but you increase the potential amount of work lost). As above, it depends on how important the data is.
 
Time machine is great for a solo backup, but it's horrible for multiple machines, it does work.. But the process is just nasty. It does a one for one copy of the file from the client to the server, then does a compression and encryption. Bare in mind that it's a continuos backup scheme, this just eats up hdd and generates network traffic.

Time machine is not a scalable solution, P5 is the current fan fav at the moment.
http://www.archiware.com/p5-backup.302.1.html

Depending on demand for the file server, it's generally not a good idea to run addition services a long side file server service.
 
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