Filed under: Software, How-tos
Automated Backups in Tiger
Richard Hough over at MacDevCenter has written up a useful little bit of information on how one can have Automated Backups on Tiger Using rsync: "One of the uses for this command is to compare the files on your internal drive to those on your backup drive, and only archive the files that have changed."Hough starts off the article, saying, "I'm going to show you how to create a free, customizable backup solution using only software that comes with Mac OS X 10.4, which will automatically back up changes to your data without user intervention. . . .To use this solution, you should back up to an external firewire hard drive or to a network volume. " I think this might persuade me to do away with my plain and simple once a week cloning of my hard-drive. I like the ideas of free and automated.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Henry said 11:37AM on 7-23-2005
Couldn't you just use Crabon Copy Cloner and psyncX and not have to deal with the termianl?
Reply
LD said 11:40AM on 7-23-2005
He should really have been using rsyncx to get HFS+ support.
Reply
Mike said 11:46AM on 7-23-2005
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.
Reply
Erik Swanson said 7:42PM on 7-23-2005
Re comment 2:
The rsync binary included with Tiger fully supports HFS+.
Reply
teece said 11:30AM on 7-24-2005
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.
Reply
Chris said 4:20AM on 7-25-2005
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.
Reply