Any server of any kind should be feed power from a quality UPS. Ensure that you invest some money into a good UPS for your server.

In addition, if your system supports redundant power supplies it is worth while configuring both of these and attaching them to different power loops.

It is possible to use Mac OS X client as a server. However, this is not recommended. If you want to use a Mac OS X machine as a server. It is well worth investing in server hardware which comes bundled with server software. However, This section is aimed at those who intend to use the Mac OS X client operating system as the platform on their backup server.

The load on a backup server may be considerable if you are indexing all files which are backed up with spotlight. You may wish to consider disabling spotlight on backup volumes. Visit the Spotlight page for details regarding this procedure.

If you are running your backup server on a client version of Mac OS X and you are backing up automatically to an external hard drive then it may be a good idea to alter the drive mounting settings for your system.

By default Mac OS X client will not mount connected external storage devices until you log into the machine. This setting may be changed by issuing the following command :

   sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin -bool true 

This command above will instruct the system to mount devices at startup regardless of whether a user has logged into the system or not.

There are other ways to deal with this issue. However, this is a simple way to ensure that your disks are mounted at startup.

There are variety of automated restart settings on a Mac OS X client system, which are worth configuring if the machine is going to be used as a server of any kind. These include but are not limited to the following :

• Automatic reboot on power failure
• Automatic reboot on kernel panic