| Macintosh backups |
Today appears to have become "home network admin day", and having done a bunch of work on the kid's Xbox, the kid's Ubuntu laptop, and my NSLU2 NAS device, I've moved onto my wife's Macintosh.
I've upgraded her to the latest version of MythTV's front end so that she can watch TV again, but I also think it might be time to take a backup of her machine.
What is the least horrible, free, way of backing up a Macintosh to a network share?
posted at: 14:18 | path: /macintosh/osx | permanent link to this entry
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#1
benley
Try using Carbon Copy Cloner, possibly combined with psync (it will offer to help you install it, iirc). You'll end up with a bootable compressed disk image which can be mounted later or cloned right back onto a new machine if necessary.
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#2
Stephen Thorne
I recall using SuperDuper!, which is shareware, but the paid version is the bit that lets you do stuff like "make a backup every night on a schedule". If you need to do a one-off backup, then it's perfect.
I think it might require backing up to another drive. I use an external drive for backups myself.
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#3
conall
I'm a purist. :)
For a snapshot backup: dd if=/dev/disk0s2 | ssh $remote-server "cat >mac.dd.img"
For an incremental, transparent backup: rsync
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#4
Matt Sheppard
It's worth having a look at this review of the different options, which looks in depth at what file system metadata they preserve correctly.
http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/03/05/the-state-of-backup-and-cloning-tools-under-mac-os-x/
The upshot is that SuperDuper (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html) or ASR are best options assuming you're willing to keep entire disk images. Unfortunately that doesn't help if you want to keep history in a sensible way. If you're serious, and willing to throw money at the problem, Retrospect might be the best option (http://www.emcinsignia.com/products/smb/retroformac/).
That said, I'm using Carbon copy cloner (as suggested by benley above) simply because I set it up once long ago and haven't had any trouble with it.
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#5
Lindsay Holmwood
On the incrimental backup front:
RsyncX (http://archive.macosxlabs.org/rsyncx/) isn't too bad if you're looking for a quick semi-graphical way of doing it.
rdiff-backup (http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/) is tried, tested, and probably your best choice.
Both methods use rsync, which OS X comes with. Generally, any rsync derived backup tool for *nix should work just fine under OS X.
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#6
Colin Charles
Skip Carbon Copy Cloner. Its buggy, and its a wonder why the psync plugin isn't there. Its a badly ported OS9 application, in my opinion.
Rsync supports resource forks now, so I suggest using that (its scriptable)
rdiff-backup if you've used it on Linux even...
However, Carbon Copy Cloner is one software that gives you a full bootable volume. Something rsync itself will not.
Really depends on what kind of backup you're after, full bootable or just incermental data?
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#7
Stephen Still
I just use rsync usually... as of 10.4, the version in Mac OS even preserves resource forks etc. CCC is good too.
Retrospect works, but is pricey, has an abysmal interface, and is quite poorly supported in my experience. It also saves your backup files in a proprietary format which nothing else can read.
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#8
Mikal
Hey guys, thanks for all your help... I'll meditate on this more before I ask more questions.
Thanks,
Mikal