I just completed my write-up for our BDR (backup and disaster recovery) product test, which we’ll share in the March issue of Business Solutions magazine. There were a couple of surprises that emerged from the test. One in particular was the Apple laptop/desktop backup test. The testers, Eric Brown, CEO, and Kevin Danis, technical manager, at Remote Technology Management (RTM), shared their personal experiences with this challenge. “We only have a couple of customers that use Apple computers, and we’ve only ever been able to back up their data by creating a workaround that’s cumbersome at best,” says Brown.
There’s three important things you need to know about backing up Apple computers:
1. Apple is not agent friendly. One of Apple’s claims to fame is that their products are less affected by spam and viruses because of the controls they have in place to restrict which products can be installed on their hard drives. The downside is that the majority of BDR products use agents, so they can’t be used on Apple products.
2. Apple has its own solution to this problem — TimeMachine. Not only is this product not good, it’s potentially harmful, according to RTM. “TimeMachine has no alerting capabilities, so if you’re backing up a storage device that reaches its storage capacity, it will automatically start overwriting other backups,” says Danis. “A VAR/MSP could potentially lose 6 months of backed up data in a short period.”
3. Apple does not support virtualization. Being able to start up a virtual machine locally or in the cloud offers several advantages, such as shortening the recovery time. Yet, Apple, which is still primarily a consumer company, does not support virtualization, according to RTM.
During the BDR product test, RTM discovered a viable solution to this problem: agentless BDRs. “With an agentless BDR, you’re not installing anything on the device; you simply provide the IP address of the device you want to back up, and the BDR software does the rest without using TimeMachine,” says Brown. “We were so impressed with this solution during the test, that we’re planning to start using one of the agentless BDRs for our customers that use Apple laptops and computers.”
February 15, 2013 at 1:31 pm
I usually don’t answer these types of advertising articles, but this is something that needs a response. There are a number of solid backup solutions from traditional to CDP for the OS X platform and almost all are cross platform including Windows, Linus and Solaris. These products include PresSTORE from Archiware and Crashplan form CodeFortyTwo Software. There are others too easily found with a little Googling.
Time Machine is defined as a local CDP application with ease of use as its primary goal. It allows non-technical users recover their own data and do a bare metal restore; something that most other backup products can’t do. It has never been advertised as anything but a user level product.
When backing up OS X, you need to test a restore and how well it retained permissions, both POSIX and ACL’s, data modification times, metadata and other properties. Products that are traditionally Windows based do a poor job of this and that is why you need a product designed to handle OS X files.
Apple explicitly supports virtualization and says so in the EULA. You can virtualize OS X as long as the host computer in an Apple computer. I know that isn’t what RTM wants, but to say Apple doesn’t support virtualization is patently false. You can even run two copies of OS X on one machine if you so wish. In that situation you could run a VM as your production machine and deal with backing up the VM, but honestly I really don’t know anyone who is doing that when it is so easy to back up OS X if you know how to do it.
I realize that RTM is guiding this article, but for those of us who specialize in cross-platform solutions, this article poorly reflects the current state of the art regarding OS X.
February 15, 2013 at 1:32 pm
Sorry for the typos. Linux, of course.
February 20, 2013 at 1:31 pm
I second Ben Greisler’s response. I have multiple OSX systems being backed up by both Time Machine and CrashPlan Pro. This gives me both local and remote (DR) backup copies, with versioning. It works like a champ, and is very reliable. I also have CrashPlan Pro backing up a Win7 VM (Vmware) on a Macbook Pro. Again, this works perfectly. A side benefit of CrashPlan Pro is that it keeps a geo map of where your devices are (when they do a backup), so if someone steals my laptop, within 15 minutes of being online, I’ll know where it is. Yes, I also have Find My Mac, but the point is that CrashPlan goes above and beyond for BDR. Having a BDR solution that works across OS platforms is also a significant benefit.