Backing up strategy

[robertpineyro@m]

I have decided not to back up via the ethernet network for many reasons. I need to back up multiple macs with different data and different operating systems ranging from )S 8.6 to OS X 10.4.3. The plan is to connect a firewire 800, firewire 400 and USB 2.0 single external hard drive to each of the macs and back up the entire hard drive of each of the macs.
What is the best way to do this, drag the hard drive icon from the source drive to the receptor hard drive's window? Will there be a problem with having multiple different OS X's and OS 9's system software in the same single partition? Thanx.

[Cam]

When I backup I don't backup the system per se, since I have the OS install disks. Presumably if the hard disk dies you would have a new disk and probably people would recommend starting with a new fresh installation of the OS. And so I don't know if multiple OS files on a back hard disk are an issue. I think it might be hard to restore them back onto a hard drive and have them work properly when backup up in this method (but I bet others on the board know how to do this in each OS).

I use Retrospect to backup from multiple computers over the ethernet onto an external hard drive. I tell it to not back up the operating system (and exclude other non-essential files that I don't care if I lose). An advantage is that the software only backs up one copy of any one file, but can restore to multiple machines that might have had that file (of course the file has to be identical in size and date to be the same file). I am not sure if the Retrospect that runs on OS X can have a non-OSX client (I suspect they can).

Recently I have read about using the Unix utility (for OS X machines) rsync that can synchronize two machines, effectively backing up hard drives onto an external drive. Carbon Copy Cloner (http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html) works with OS X to do full backups and make bootable drives, but also is a front end for a psync program for similar synchronization.

[Cam]

Also, Retrospect runs everynight and does an incremental backup to the backed up files. I think the "sync" programs I mentioned also do incremental backups. Your method would give you a single day snapshot of your hard disk.