Backing up client machines to a specially-provisioned network share is one of the marquee features of Leopard Server. Unfortunately, it’s a feature with far more promise than documentation. When it works, it’s a dream, finally freeing you from an aging Retrospect setup (or worse). When it fails, though, it tends to do so without much insight as to what’s gone wrong. If you can’t get Time Machine backing up to a server, you’ll get plenty of detail as to why. Once a machine stops backing up properly, though, there’s no real indication as to how you might get it working again.

Advertised heavily and presented enticingly, every Macintosh user has heard that Time Machine takes the complexity out of backups. While that may be true for individual users, managing numerous backups over a network is still a significant challenge for most Macintosh administrators. So with all the attention paid to the Time Machine in Leopard client, there hasn’t been much focus on how Leopard Server can be used to back up multiple users to remote disks. In fact, if you’re not looking closely, the Time Machine features in OS X Server are easy to miss entirely.

With it’s spacey presentation and it’s promise of effortless data safety, Time Machine is the marquee feature of OS X Leopard, mentioned in every review as worth the price of the upgrade alone. While the ability to minimize data loss on any machine is fantastic, Time Machine presents some unique challenges for the people tasked with maintaining those machines. The minimal configuration options that make Time Machine so easy to use can also make it hard to control. Fortunately, there are more tools available than are exposed in the graphical interface.