March 8, 2004
Mac Backup
I know lots of people out there are relatively recent switchers, so I thought I'd do a quick poll to see what backup solutions are in use.
I've been using a hand-built backup script from my linux days, but this isn't working too well any more since it relied on features of the ext2 disk format that aren't present in the Mac's HFS. And it seems, well, frightfully gauche to be using a command-line backup solution on a Mac.
Suggestions?
Posted by savs at March 8, 2004 11:34 AMI use psync via a cronjob created by Carbon Copy Cloner. It runs at 2 AM daily and clones to an external FireWire disk.
Posted by: Kiran Jonnalagadda at March 8, 2004 2:55 PMMy Mac being a laptop, a cron job is of no use, and I was wondering if there exists a commandline to burn a rewritable DVD.
Posted by: Sylvain Wallez at March 8, 2004 5:56 PMWhy no command-line? To me the beauty of macosx is in the combination of cool visual tools with the powerful command-line utilities that we know and love ;-)
I use rsync to external FireWire drives, and regular DVD copies of critical stuff.
Looks like "hdiutil burn" could be used to burn DVDs from the command-line, but I've never tried it.
Posted by: Bertrand Delacretaz at March 9, 2004 10:08 AMhttp://www.retrospect.com/ is good, but is not free. Offers mirror copies, tape support, and FTP. It also has a nice client/server module if you are backing up a small network of machines.
I have also used http://www.backjack.com for online backups. Again not free, but good.
Posted by: Ashley Howes at March 9, 2004 2:04 PMOne thing to potentially check out is Novell's iFolder. It's free software name will be "Simias" when it's released in a few weeks - it's a way of having files locally that you can occasionally sync up to a central server, located anywhere (lan, net, etc..)
This will be fully integrated into Gnome, but no idea what the state of play with regards proprietary desktops I'm afraid. But it does look rather sweet.
Posted by: Alex Hudson at March 9, 2004 4:43 PM