pudge's Journal: Mac OS X Backups

I need a backup solution for Mac OS X. Nothing fancy: just back up my files and programs, via FTP or file server or somesuch, to a remote server, and be able to restore individual files or directories.

Backup from Apple is a nice solution, but works only with .mac. I have a .mac account, but I have gigabytes to back up. I need it to be a local remote, not a remote remote. :-) I like Retrospect, and Retrospect Express would work for me, but it is $50 for a single client.

Are there any other solutions out there?

Now Playing: Mama I'm Strange - Melissa Etheridge (Breakdown)

nothing simple

[JDizzy]

Slap me if I fall into the extreamly too simple mold, but wouldn't something like: `(cd somefolder ; tar czf - * ) | telnet some-server "(cd destination-folder ; cat > backup-file-name.tgz)"`

Works like a charm for me, however. I typically just burn stuff to cd-rom. So to do gigabytes, you need a way to send in stuff larger than 700Mb, and get many cd's out of it. The only problem is the constant 'getting up to feed the cdrom drive a new disc' routine. I duno if osX has a mkiso command, or a burncd command, but here is what I use on FreeBSD:

# A function to burn the contents of a folder.
# A single paramater the folder path.
Dir2Disc()
{
if [ ! -d "${1}" ]
then return 1
elif [ $(du -s "${1}" | cut -f1) -gt 699999 ]
then return 1
fi
if mkisofs -R "$1" | burncd -e -s 8 -f /dev/acd0c data - fixate
then return 0
else return 1
fi
}

I'd put more, but slashcode would complain about whitespaces, etc.. So the above is the part that burns a folder. To get it working on large amounts of stuff, or things larger than 700Mb, you have to make your script split things up and put 700 chuncks in /tmp, or something.

This clearly falls in the "nothing too simple" area. The cheap way is to roll your own backup scripts. gzip -9 is a wonderful thing! =)

Amanda + HFS-aware archivers

[extra88]

I haven't implemented an OS X backup system yet but I've been looking into it.

Amanda [amanda.org] can use a variety of common UNIX archivers but for OS X you need an archiver which supports resource forks and Mac metadata. Here are two I know of.

hfstar [versiontracker.com]

hfspax [versiontracker.com] I've used this manually to create archives of a few directories. It also comes with 2 drag 'n drop apps for creating archives and for unarchiving.

I'm sure there are many backup systems that could be made to work for OS X by using one of these archivers. You probably can't do a bootable restore from them but you probably don't care about that. I think almost any full system restore of OS X is going to start with a clean install then followed by a restoration of the changed parts.

Mike Bomich [bombich.com] knows a lot about OS X and has good information. He also created Carbon Copy Cloner [versiontracker.com] which can create a full disk backup which can be used for a full bootable restore (or deployment on multiple machines).

RsyncX [macosxlabs.org] could also be used for backups.

macosxlabs.org [macosxlabs.org] doesn't have a ton of information but what they have is pretty good. The topic forums don't have a lot of activity but there's some good stuff there.