I'm hoping someone can help me think this through. I run a research lab and
need my people (6, using Mac laptops) to be able to have automated backups.
I'm going to be setting up an Xserve server with lots of storage space (1.2
Tb on 3 drives as I understand it). I'd like to partition all that storage
into about 10 partitions (to allow for extra people in the future). Rather
than going with a backup archive product like Retrospect, I'd like to make
the backups exact mirror clones of the people's systems so the contents can
be used directly, booted from, etc. I plan to set up a scheduler for Carbon
Copy Cloner to make each partition an exact mirror of each person's laptop.
What I need advice on is this: how do I control access to their partition?
How do I make sure that each partition on the drive is accessible only to
the person it is designated for? Do I make accounts for everyone on the
server, and if so, how do I designate the partition as belonging to that
account? Or, perhaps I need to initiate the backups from the server, and
control it all myself (not letting them access any of the partitions
directly). The question then is, given that we have dynamic IP within the
institute, is knowing the laptop's name (and password) enough for a script
running on a server on the same LAN to be able to mount its hard drive? Can
I mount a local machine by name not knowing its IP address? Any thoughts
would be appreciated.

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Mike Levin
mlevin77@comcast.net