I run a biology lab with about 10 people (most of whom use Mac laptops to
store their important data). After a recent hard drive crash fiasco, I have
given up trying to convince people to make regular backups, and now want to
institute an automated fool-proof system. What I'd like to do is get a
networked machine (Xserve perhaps?) with lots of hard drive space, and
partition it so that each person has his own volume on that machine. Then
I'd like this machine to, once a day, try to connect to each person's
laptop, and use something like SuperDuper, Backup Toolkit, or
CarbonCopyCloner to make an exact sync copy of their hard disk to the
partition on the server. I do have Retrospect as well, but I'd like the copy
to be bootable and be an exact copy of their data, not an archive which
needs to be restored via a special procedure. I could also go with a reverse
scheme, whereby each laptop tries to connect to the server and copy its hard
drive to the partition. Either way, what I need is a way to have the Mac
automatically mount the other machine's storage on its desktop before the
backup takes place. What's the best way to do that? Assuming I have the
account name and passwords of the owners on both sides, and the names of all
the machines, how do I get it to automatically make sure the target disk is
available (mounted through the network) when it's needed? Is there a Unix-y
way to do this which is better than using the applications I mentioned? If
anyone has suggestions about this, or can propose a better overall strategy,
please post! Thank you.

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Mike Levin
mlevin77@comcast.net