Automated Backups in Tiger

rsync-ing to a mounted network share is horribly inefficient as it causes a large amount of network traffic during the comparison phase. If you do rsync over ssh, the work gets split between your desktop machine and a seperate rsync process that runs on the backup server, initially passing only checksums between themselves.

I actually use 'rsync' and the gnu version of 'cp' to make snapshots of my Linux machines (two snapshots a day, two day's history). Using hard links, I can keep four copies of the same stuff with only slightly more than the space of 1 copy (assuming most stuff remains unchanged from day to day). I had planned to use this same script for my iMac to the NFS mounted Linux volume. Alas, it's fraught with difficulty. 'rsync' on the Mac pukes a lot of errors (mostly they seem minor, but seeing how this is a backup, I have to check everyone and make sure it was minor). It seems to often get confused and do full backups when it doesn't need to. BSD 'cp' doesn't have support for hard links. GNU 'cp' will work, *except* it doesn't have support for HFS+ extended attributes. I was (and am) bummed at this hassle. 'rsync' on the Mac is not the super-cool tool that it is on other Unix platforms.

Re comment 2: The rsync binary included with Tiger fully supports HFS+.

I dunno if they've fixed it, but last time I looked CCC was just a front end to some command line utilities. The biggest problem I saw with CCC, and the reason I dropped it, was that it took your administrator password and kept it in the clear (e.g. while CCC is running, start a command line, do a 'ps -aux' and see the commands CCC is running, and your password that it fed the commands) for all on your machine to see. Gaping security hole.

He should really have been using rsyncx to get HFS+ support.

Couldn't you just use Crabon Copy Cloner and psyncX and not have to deal with the termianl?