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@xxxxxxxxx
