Mirrored Apollo Cloud 2 DUOs and Time Machine Backups

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  • Last Post 13 April 2018
Kevin Heatwole posted this 20 March 2018

  • Purchase 2 Apollo Cloud 2 DUOs
  • Set up DUOs with RAID 1 and mirrored to each other
  • Create 2 users
  • Move 1 DUO to my office
  • Keep 1 DUO in my home
  • Use office DUO for Time Machine backups of the office Macs (5 Macs)
  • Use home DUO for Time Machine backups of my home's Macs (2 Macs)
  • All Time Machine backups sync'd to both DUOs (in background)

Is the above use case supported?

Can multiple Macs in 2 locations each backup using Time Machine at the same time? That is, can each Mac specify the DUO on the local subnet as a Time Machine backup?

Will the Time Machine backups be fast since each Mac is backing up files to the DUO on the Macs subnet?

Can I restore an office Mac Time Machine backup to a Mac in my home using the DUO in my home?

I'm looking for a Time Machine backup system that can be used onsite and remotely backed up so if my home has been destroyed (by fire?), I can safely restore the Macs that were destroyed from the backups on the DUO in my office, and vice versa... I need a disaster recovery plan that will work once set up and be reliable to restore all data in the unlikely case of a disaster in one location and not the other.

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Yu Qin posted this 09 April 2018

 Hi Kevin,

Thanks for your interest in setting up a recovery system using Apollo. I agree a backup plan is core to both home and office environment, however allow me to provide some suggestions to the plan. You'll need to use one Apollo Cloud for Time Machine Backups, of all Macs. And then mirror from the 1st device to the second one. The mutual sync on both Apollo is not supported yet. In sum, the recommended steps are:

 

1.Backup All Mac via Time Machine Backups to the 1st Apollo.

2.Use Apollo Mirror function to mirror the 1st to the 2nd one at remote site. 

(If performing the mirroring setup for the first time, both Apollo units have to be on the same local area network.)

3.The 1st copy of Time Machine Backups from Macs to Apollo1 will be synced to Apollo2, but the incremental changes of Time Machine won’t be synced to Apollo2 on current version. However, this feature will be supported soon.

 

If you need some more info to help with the decision, let us know. Also our support portal runs 24/7 and by logging a call there you'll be contacted shortly by our team.

https://support.promise.com/

Thanks and regards

Kevin Heatwole posted this 13 April 2018

I'll wait until you support my use case better. Note that my use case really only requires the DUO to have 2 partitions, where each DUO is mirroring its 1st partition on the local DUO to the 2nd partition on the remote DUO. That is, one way sync but set up so that the rsync is done in background (with possible rate limiting) of only one partition to the backup partition (as a way of maintaining an offsite Time Machine backup backup). 

Note that Time Machine creates hard-links for files with no changes for a given backup into the Time Machine snapshot. Any syncing should do the same on the mirror and only changed blocks should be sent over the internet. Outgoing internet is 1/10th the speed of incoming internet bandwidth, and this bandwidth is precious and shouldn't saturate the network link by transmitting bytes that are already on the remote DUO.

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