I support a company that has a few Macs. They aren't happy with the solution I'm running for them, iBackup, which is free. I personally think that their Mac users are messing around with the app, but I digress; the customer is always correct. Anyway, I'm no Mac guru, and I need a good product that: 1. Is free or cheap (under $100). 2. Will back up to a network device if possible. 3. Is somewhat hidden so the Mac users won't jack with it. Thanks. J
Purchase Leopard. Attach an external hard drive (at least 500 GB), and set up Time Machine. This will produce a system image which integrates changes you make on the system over time. If your system crashed, you can use any one of these snapshots in time for restoration.
I'd LIKE to go this way, but these guys are being stubborn about the external drive vs the NAS device they just spent a couple of grand on- they have to use the NAS because they spent money on it.
use cron to schedule backups to an SMB share on the network. If you are unfamiliar with cron in unix, lookup cronnix, a gui front end for os x.
Time Machine's an interesting cookie. It's not very configurable, but it will work on a LAN with attached storage. It has to reformat whatever drive into Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) in order to work. I have no idea how you would do that with multiple network machines besides partitioning the NAS drive. I don't know of any 3rd party applications aside from iBackup that I'd recommend. If I were you, I'd just build/run an Unix executable on each computer that does exactly what you want. As for me, I just connect an external drive to my G5 once every couple of weeks to back up my iTunes library, my Documents folder, and my Pictures folder. I don't trust other people to back things up manually -- you need something like Time Machine.
Say Jeremiah check this article out. Time machine is the lick with OSX and this shows how to use it over a NAS. http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080420211034137
