Thought I'd run this by you guys before I finalise my plans for a job.

4 Mac pro's & 1 powermac G5

I need centralised storage (fast) and back including offsite. 250GB data currently but this is increasing fast.

They're a bunch of designers so they may well forget to take drives away with them but I have the option for online backup.

I was thinking of sticking a server in & using chronosync to backup the clients to it. I can then either back it up to external drives or set it to backup offsite to my backup server in my data centre.

Any other ideas?

£3k budget for it.

Chronosync is a very nice product, but as far as I know, it's only Mac to Mac, so your backup server would need to be a Mac.

rsync + cron may be a cheaper and more flexible option, you could rsync to a local and a remote server and possibly to an online backup service (not sure about that though, not looked into online backups). Using OS X logout hooks you could even get the rsync to sync before shutting down (the users would need to understand that this happens and not try and force power off), for a nice GUI try iHook.

If they are looking after it after you have set it up, I'd say stick with Chronosync, it can get expensive (probably not as much as 3K though ) and it's not as flexible as rsync, but much, MUCH more user friendly!

I use retrospect to network back up clients to a server. Server is then synced to 3 firewire hard drives which are removed daily.
Didge