The power of OS X Server

OS X Server is great for managing backups on your network

Once upon a time OS X Server was a specialised version of the operating system and needed to be installed as such. Now it’s simply an app that you download for just £13.99. Among its many network management features is centralised Time Machine support, meaning that when running on a dedicated Mac, say, perhaps a Mac mini with a large hard drive connected, perhaps in RAID configuration, any user can keep track of backups from a number of different machines.

After installing the Server app you can go to the Time Machine section and switch on centralised Time Machine support. As well as specifying more than one location to be made available for backups, you can set quotas for each user on your network (provided clients are running Mavericks) to make sure that one user doesn’t quickly fill up the drive. You can also monitor who’s backed up and when, and delete backups if necessary. The drives or locations that you make available will appear to other users on the network when they choose a Time Machine backup location.

Mavericks Server is capable of lots of other cool stuff, and it’s now much easier to use. There’s support for centralised databases of contacts, calendars, messaging as well as user privilege management, mail, web and wiki hosting and monitoring of network traffic and local CPU usage. Whether you’re a curious beginner or running a business, it’s a handy tool for managing users and data.