Using an Airport Extreme & USB hard drive as a small office backup system

March 24, 2009 1:01 PM

I'm considering using a Airport Extreme and large USB drive as a simple backup solution for a small business (about 10 people). Has anyone used it this way, and how well did it work?

We are a 10-person office that is looking for a better backup solution. I am considering buying an Apple Airport Extreme and stringing a large USB drive off this, then setting up all of our Macs to use this as a time machine backup server. However, I'm a bit concerned on how the system might handle 10 users all trying to back up at once. Has anyone used a solution like this, and how well did it perform if you did?

posted by baggers to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Airport Extreme + disk is not intended for use as a backup target; for that, Apple really wants you to buy a Time Capsule. Now, you can hack Time Machine to work with Airport Extreme, but do you want your backups to rely on a hack?

Another problem is that with 10 people using the same disk as the backup target, your TM archive isn't going to extend back very far, and you'll need to prune the backup sources pretty carefully. You could extend capacity by plugging in an external RAID setup, which would probably give you adequate capacity, but it would need hardware RAID.

I think that if you're running gigabit ethernet (or 802.11N if you must be wireless) on all your macs, then the network traffic won't be too bad after the initial images get written over. The machines won't generally be backing up at exactly the same time.

I suspect it would make more sense to install OS X Server on a machine that has more performance and expandability than a TC (even a new Mac Mini with Firewire 800), and gives you more control; that can be used as a TM target as well.
posted by adamrice at 1:14 PM on March 24

You can't use Time Machine with a USB drive attached to an Airport Extreme without screwing around with some settings, and Apple doesn't support it. Or at least they have not prior to the recent update of the AE.

As for how it'd handle it, if they're all backing up concurrently, you could pretty easily saturate a network. Also keep in mind that if it's the prior generation AE, it's going to revert to the lowest network speed (i.e. 802.11b if you have a b client) for wireless. If it's all wired PCs, you're less limited, but it only provides gigabit networking on the uplink port.

Then there's the issue of saturating the USB connection....
posted by mikeh at 1:16 PM on March 24

Please, allow me to recommend as your USB drive a Drobo. Drobo are amazing, in that they are a hassle free raid system, which very easily can protect you against hard drive failure in your backup.

I currently run a 1.5 TB setup composed of two 1.5 TB drives in a mirrored RAID, where in if one of the two drives fails, I lose nothing. The Drobo makes monitoring and maintaining a RAID easy, especially since, at any time, you can have up to four drives in the RAID, and it will automatically configure the partitions across them however you desire. AND the drive's are hot swappable, so you don't even have to shut down the Drobo if a drive dies to replace it.

I have mine hooked up directly to my PC, where it serves as a backup for the entire house network (we mapped every computer in the house to view it as the same drive letter / networked drive) and the systems all automatically back up particular parts of their drives to the Drobo every week. Lest you think this is PC only, they have a HUGE Mac community, and I know for a fact they have several scripts already built for integrating TimeMachine into the Drobo system.
posted by strixus at 1:18 PM on March 24

Sounds decent for daily backups with the above mentione dtime capsule solution. Any robust backup plan has off site data storage in case of fire/whatever. I would recommend figuring out how to back up amazon S3 every weekend, jungledisk makes an excellent client for OSX for amazon s3.
posted by zentrification at 1:24 PM on March 24

This is a pet peeve of mine, but RAID is not a backup. RAID is protection against a particular kind of hardware failure, and in some cases a performance enhancer. RAID will not help you if your computer or disk is stolen, if there is a fire or flood at your office, if the disk is knocked off a desk onto a floor, somebody or a virus wipes your disk clean, etc.

If you are running a small business, please, PLEASE, set up some kind of 2-tiered backup where nightly backups are kept locally and weekly/monthly/whatever backups are rotated offsite. If you are not a design or graphics shop, your disk space requirements are probably modest and you can get away with two office-wide Time Machine targets, one of which is always kept offsite. If you're a design/graphics shop, you'll eat disk space like there's no tomorrow and then backup starts to get complicated, since you would need a large server or individual TM setups.
posted by ldenneau at 1:36 PM on March 24

I'm not sure how comfortable you are with a 3rd party backup solution, but you may want to try Mozy or another online backup solution. They have attractive price points and very useful features. I used to backup exclusively to an external hard drive but the cost of backups and risk of data loss were too high. Now I pay Mozy $100 a year for unlimited backups that I can access anywhere in the world from any computer. That may be a little pricey for an office of 10, but if you don't have much data to take care of just yet, you can start with the free plan which gives you 2gb of storage. Also, I know of some people who buy unlimited storage space with webspace providers (e.g. Dreamhost) and then setup rsync to backup their data.
posted by mahoganyslide at 2:33 PM on March 24

Do not do this. Do not use the drobbo. 10 macs is not a 'small' network. Do a proper onsite/offsite backup. Retrospect has finally been updated. Victory!
posted by mmdei at 5:01 PM on March 24

Just to add a bit about using the initially intended idea. I just finished setting up a 1TB Airdisk through my Airport Extreme and am using Time Machine to backup four computers on my network.

Yes, I had to make one hack in order to see the Airdisk as a usable HDD for TimeMachine

The one computer that has backed up the initial backup wirelessly was painfully slow to complete.

I used Time Machine Editor to set the intervals to happen at night so that there would not be unnecessary chuckiness to the network.

And finally, yes it all works as planned.

With that said, I think JungleDisk looks awfully good.

You can read about my setting issues here
posted by silsurf at 7:14 PM on March 24