Backup Solutions for Mac OS X? 125
SpartanVII asks: "I purchased a Mac roughly two years ago and have made the switch with a fair amount of ease. However, one thing that has troubled me is how best to backup my important data to an external hard drive. Right now, I have rigged up an Automator workflow that runs every night, but I have also seen software options like SuperDuper and Knox. Since the Automator workflow lacks much of the flexibility and features available with these apps, I am ready to try something else. What app have you come across that provides the best backup solution?"
rsync, bash script, calendar event (Score:3, Informative)
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How so?
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If Leopard is on the horizon, then just use the Timewarp(?) snapshot tool built into the OS.
If you want a full image backup done efficiently, then CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) is the free GUI tool of choice.
Other great options: DAR, rdiff-backup, Un
script for snapshots (Score:2)
This makes a zero space snapshop of me. preserves everything except permissions. This is not a backup it's a snapshot. do the backup with rsync. then take a snapshot.
I sometimes use rdiffbackup too
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Re:rsync, bash script, calendar event (Score:5, Informative)
Re:rsync, bash script, calendar event (Score:5, Interesting)
Any suggestions (or flames as to why my backup strategy will fail catastrophically) welcomed!
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Re:rsync, bash script, calendar event (Score:5, Interesting)
If you don't mind resetting creation and modification times of every file (not just changed ones) on the backup every time you backup.
rdiff-backup creates and maintains a copy of not only the current data but also keeps reverse diffs so you can recover old versions too.
It's extremely fragile. Any interruption in any backup and it will leave things in a state where manual cleanup and starting the backup over from scratch is required.
Retrospect will compress the data to save drive space, and it allows you to restore via a date of your choice.
It works great when it works. But it also has a nasty tendency to corrupt its catalog files, forcing you to run a "repair" operation on you backups. For disk-based backups this is not too bad since it just takes time; for tape you get to feed in all the tapes in the set so it can read them. This bug has persisted across at least 3 paid upgrades now. Not everybody experiences it, and I don't know what conditions trigger it, but I've seen it at multiple sites with different setups.
As for SuperDuper, I've heard only good things about it. Seems to be a very solid little product for individual backup. I haven't tried it because I need network backup for multiple machines. (I'm so frustrated I'm about 90% of the way to deciding to write my own!)
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I usually make an image of the machine with DriveImage XML, and once I have that bare metal restore done, restore whatever files I need from backuppc.
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the -E option is probably a good idea also. add it if you want.
the script is designed to be run with stdout directed into a file, like such:
it keeps a log of backups and also makes a list of all your applications so you know what you had in case you ever have to start from scratch.
anyway, here'
backups (Score:2, Informative)
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-E --extended-attributes copy extended attributes, resource forks
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Do Resource Fork Matter Anymore? (Score:1)
Am I being over-confident?
Using the -E option with "Apple's" rsync is a bit of a pain because the resource fork dates change all the time even if the file is not accessed.
rdiff-backup (Score:3, Informative)
rdiff-backup creates and maintains a copy of not only the current data but also keeps reverse diffs so you can recover old versions too. You can backup to another hard driver or directory, or over a network. For remote backups, it uses the rsync protocol so it only transmits changes.
It's a command-line tool, so it's not very OSX'y, but it works very, very well. I use it to back up all of my machines, including some remote servers. I do it all with cron jobs, and all over network links, because that way I can just ignore it, but you can also run it manually if you prefer.
SuperDuper! (Score:2, Interesting)
If you have a firewire external hard drive, you can have SuperDuper! backup your computer's drive to it and if you should ever want to step back to your last backup or lose your laptop's hard drive, all you have to do is plug in the external drive, press option while you are starting up your mac, boot from the external drive, ru
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All you have to do is reinstall Leopard on the primary drive and plug in your old Time Machine drive during the installation when it asks. Not the same as a bootable clone, but clearly a step up.
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Cross-Platform Solution (Score:2, Insightful)
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Well, gnutella is portable...
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For now, rsync and a couple of scripts. I regularly sync the important parts of my home directory between 3 different machines. Soon, I will add a fourth, off-site one. I don't bother backing up anything outside my home directory, as I can get all that with apt-get. Perhaps one day I will make a couple of files containing a list of packages I have installed.
I've looked at a couple of dedicated backup solutions, but, so far, the conclusion has
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That's one of the reasons why I prefer [Symantec] VERITAS NetBackup Enterprise Server — running on a Sun E450 with Solaris 9 — as my personal backup solution. Its native format is tar, so I should never have any problems with data retrieval, regardless of whether or not I have access to that particular app.
Well, there's that, and my great love of overkill. It's akin to using an interocitor [wikipedia.org] to make popcorn.
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Here is my script for rsyncX that handles resource forks- Note the list of excludes you can edit starting with
Retrospect (Score:3, Insightful)
We use it to back up our web and database servers. The high end products might be over kill but the Express version might do you right. Retrospect will compress the data to save drive space, and it allows you to restore via a date of your choice. Lots of scheduling and etc options. Works like a champ.
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- seemingly random instances of Retrospect grabbing all available CPU time (when no backup is active) and continuing to suck CPU time until the application is force-quit. Other people seem to be struggling with this as well (google for Retrospect LaunchCFMA)
- Retrospect recognizing our tape auto-loader but not the tape
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The reports are so silly I've rigged up a system to use a database to load them into that I can query..
I have no problem with any restores, just silly stuff such as Net Retrys and having to reinstall Retrospect Clients.
On the other hard the Windows version 7
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Synchronize Pro X (Score:2)
rsnapshot (Score:3)
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Today shell scripts, tomorrow Time Machine (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know about right now, but once Leopard comes out, I guess it would be Time Machine [apple.com]. Just wait until it starts shipping in the beginning of the next year.
If you don't want to wait or upgrade, write a shell script doing the job for you. I don't know what kind of experiences others have had with backup tools on the Mac, but Retrospect kept crashing on me when trying to run it. I wouldn't trust that kind of software to keep track of my backups. So I guess it's pretty much shell scripts or nothing right now.
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I don't know about right now, but once Leopard comes out, I guess it would be Time Machine. Just wait until it starts shipping in the beginning of the next year.
I'd advise against doing this. Backup solutions should really be time-tested and proven. I would not adopt a newly-released backup solution. Especially one from Apple. As much as I love Apple software, their existing backup software, "Backup" is an absolute disaster. Given this track record, I see no reason to trust Time Machine.
I currently use Retrospect, but recent versions haven't been too impressive either. I'd take the recommendations of checking out Super Duper and perhaps Carbon Copy Cloner. I've u
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Me? I'm sticking with monthly backups to CD-Rs. Time Machine will simply add a daily fallback.
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I think there are some users [nslog.com] of Apple's Backup who would disagree... [rentzsch.com]
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Larry
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I'm mainly considering NetVault because it was recommended by our Xserve vendor, and they said they could support it. But it's a tough decision, because a backup solution has to work flawlessly for years. And it's not easy to find people with experience in some of these Mac solutions apart from Retrospect.
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What I'm thinking about is using Amazon's S3 service [slashdot.org] along with JungleDisk [jungledisk.com] to get a cheap online, reliable, unlimited virtual drive for Time Machine to store its backups on. I just hope that Time Machine is smart enough to queue up its transactions when the network storage is not available. I also wonder what the performance will be like.
Things are moving fast in this space. I'd love to see a general online storage solution with WebDAV support, something like Gallery2 or Flickr built-in, permissions manag
Carbon Clone Copier (Score:1)
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Required reading (Score:4, Informative)
http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/03/05/the-sta
http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/04/23/mac-bac
Maybe TimeMachine will offer an interesting solution...
http://www.apple.com/se/macosx/leopard/timemachin
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Both machines booted happily from the back-ups. I'm sure happy to have both machines backed-up.
It's not a clone either, since the backups are missing all the pre-linky goodness of OS X until you actually boot from them.
I was very happy to pay the $30 for SuperDuper.
[[requiring non-blank subjects is stupid]] (Score:1)
Surprisingly, many OSX backup tools aren't either. There's an extensive comparison [plasticsfuture.org] of many different backup programs for OSX and it has lists of exactly what the programs will backup/restore and whether or not those things tend to be important.
file vault and scp (Score:1)
i already had generated ssh keys and this worked well. i'd have it run three times a day.
however, i began to get thinking why encrypt my local home directory only to put it on the server unencrypted. so i've switched over to using scp to copy my entire file vault disk image once a week. i have giga
Don't use Backup from dotMac! (Score:4, Informative)
Backup crashed.
Tried again. Crashed again.
Backup won't restore more than one or two files at a time without crashing. It seems to be a memory leak, as it dies during a memory allocation routine. Granted, I had a lot of files and a lot of incrementals. But this is the JOB OF BACKUP! To be able to RESTORE my FILES! The files are there, I can see them (each backup file has a disk image inside it which you can mount manually). I just can't get at them systematically.
So, I contacted Tech Support. Got something like "wow, that's strange", sent my logs and such. It's been two weeks and I've heard nothing. My followup emails go into the bit-bucket.
By now, it would have been easier for me to have spent the last four nights manually mounting disk images and copying files over by hand.
Needless to say, I'm going with Retrospect as soon as I have something to backup again. Cancelling my dotMac account too.
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So when I go to restore 20,000+ files from across 280+ backup files, it dies with a malloc error. Somewhere, it's leaking memory. There are other people on the dotMac support board who
Similar experience, and a solution (Score:1)
The Apple Genius ("That's only my job title, and not an actual description.") blamed the problem on my numerous incrementals. He said that Backup needs full backups every so often to work reliably.
ChronoSync (Score:2)
I'm happy to fiddle and tweak and produce home-brew solutions to many things, but not as the sole backup: The point of a backup program is to ensure that you have backed up exactly what you think you have backed up. ChonoSync provides a reliable and flexible back-up system. It is commercial ($30) -- which you may not like -- but they offer free updates to a reasonably priced product, and have been around for a while. Their customer service is also excellent: they provided a less restrict
Retrospect (Score:3)
Oh no, not again... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm no expert, but I can point you to a couple of interesting web pages by people who do seem to know a lot of the details:
You also need to think about what your backups are for and how much time and money you're prepared to expend: for some, burning a few personal files to CDR every few months will suffice, whereas for others an external HD holding a complete clone is the thing, and power users may need daily or weekly incremental backups with the ability to retrieve any file going back years.
Personally speaking, I'm in the middle category, with a large external Firewire HD holding a clone of each of my drives, which I redo every month or so. (Having it bootable is also a good idea, and has saved my bacon at least once!) I've mostly been using Carbon Copy Cloner, which has given good results, but I've recently switched to SuperDuper! which is cheap and seems to preserve absolutely everything. But don't take my word for it: read the linked pages, work out your needs, and make up your own mind.
But DO think about it! Disaster WILL strike in some form or other; disks DO fail (as I know to my cost), and you need to plan for it. It's not a question of how much time or money you can afford to spend; it's a question of how much data you can afford to lose!
Carbon Copy Cloner (Score:1)
Sure, there are quite a few different tools and systems and what-not with which one can easily make backups of your Mac; however, two things I like most about Carbon Copy Cloner are:
1.) that it can make a fully bootable disk *and*
2.) it actually does what its name implies: it copies your data onto another disk.
These handy features can be quite a relief in the
Re: Carbon Copy Cloner (Score:2)
If you never use these, or don't care about them -- and, more importantly, you know that none of the apps you use does either -- then by all means use it. But if you're not sure, it's worth considering something like SuperDuper! which does preserve all of that too.
That
Super Duper! and Unison (Score:1)
I don't see how Apple's Time Machine [apple.com] could make Super Duper! obsolete, at least for me. What if I can't boot anymore and needs to work now?
Deja Vu, it comes with toast (Score:3, Informative)
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harddisk no problem (Score:2)
What I'm looking for and haven't found yet is something that'll do backups over the network, and is not
similar question (Score:1)
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Connecting the laptop via FireWire cable after starting up in remote drive mode (hold down t after powering on) and copying the entire home directory from one to the other will do it. The working account should not have administrative powers. I'm guessing that it will go more smoothly if the working account on both machines were set up identically with the same name, password, userid, and groupid. This should happen if they were established at the same sequence point (next account after the initial one, per
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Shell scripts (Score:2)
OS X provides "rsync," which is one of the best tools for the job, and it works on most (all?) Unix-based platforms as well as Windows (using Cygwin). With rsync, you should definitely look into the following options:
--exclude (exclude file name patterns from being backed up. You don't really nead your web cache
Deja vu of course (Score:2)
It uses psync (like rsync but with resource forks etc.) and is generally brilliant. I simply create an incremental duplicate of my entire hard drive to an equally sized other hard drive every day at 6 PM.
Silverkeeper (Score:1)
ChronoSync (Score:2, Informative)
atempo time navigator (Score:1)
Not practical for home use, but (Score:1)
We were finally given the go-ahead to try something new, and since our backup guy had been checking out Tivoli Storage Manager and really like it, we gave
Built-in tools do just fine (Score:1)
It's fast, it's a pure copy, and it doesn't modify the access times of files on $SOURCEVOL. Make sure you're booted from a different volume and you use the "-erase" flag, though,
Retrospect if you're serious (Score:1)
I use Retrospect 6.1 to run nightly incremental backups of
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Re:Retrospect if you're serious (NOT!) (Score:1)
Try Backuplist+ (Score:2)
I have used Impression and SuperDuper (Score:1)
I used Impression for over a year and really liked it. I used it because it did verification of the data written and this feature was very important to me. Unfortunately, Impression became an orphan and I switched to SuperDuper.
Fortunately, Impression has a new parent and is no longer an orphan. You can buy it at http://www.ineedyoursoftware.com/ [ineedyoursoftware.com] .
I am sticking with SuperDuper for now as it extremely easy to use.
Both programs back up to standard Mac files so retrieval is not dependent upon any special
Amanda or other UNIX backup software (Score:2)
tolisgroup bru le (Score:1)
Déjà Vu - For my money !! (Score:1)
-ZuCom [zucom.com]
.Mac? (Score:2)
Several Options (Score:2)
SuperDuper is nice. Personally, I use Synk Backup from decimus [decimus.net]. There's also Retrospect for professional backup, and of course, Mac OS X 10.5 will include its own Backup functionality called Time Machine [apple.com].
Avoid Apple's current Backkup app, as it sucks.
psyncx (Score:1)
at my last job, i backed up a machine using retrospect and an exabyte loader and it was weeks of headaches. nothing went right at all.
psyncx doesn't have the complex options of something like retrospect, but it's perfect for the user of a single machine who wants a basic backup - selected folders or drives copied to another location - done on a schedule of manually, using inexpensive shareware software.
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Bacula (Score:2)
or try (Score:1)
Free Backup Solution (Score:1)
Don't forget off site backup (Score:2)
1. Nightly rsync of my iMac and powerbook to a hard disk connected via firewire to my iMac (runs from cron)
2. Plans to install rsnapshot [rsnapshot.org] to shorten the window of exposure from 1 day to 1 hour. Used to use this on Linux with great success, fully expect that this will work well on OS X.
3. I bought 2 firewire/USB drive enclosures, and populated them with PIDE drives. I keep one, and gave my sister one. The enclosures are identical and the drives are partitioned w
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SilverKeeper is actually more flexible than that (Score:1)
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