elmegil's Journal: yet another foolish mac os question

Time again for another backup of the iBook. This time the battery board is hosed; the battery won't charge, the little LED won't come on, but everything else works fine. The nice thing about this is that it gives us some leisure to get the backup done easily/straightforwardly.

So I'm questing for a good (enough), cheap/free backup solution for Tiger that won't make me manually figure out how much will fit on a CD. I want to say "back up this whole directory and prompt me when you need another disc".

I hear that the Apple Backup program works for this, but in a big WTF (shouldn't this be a BASIC OS FUNCTION?) it is (reportedly) only of any use to burn to CD if I own a .mac account. Hello? If I have a .mac account, chances are good I'll do most of my backup to there maybe?

Google is not coming up with a huge amount of helpful suggestions (possibly due to the ambiguity of "mac os x" or "macos x" or any of the other dozen variants I could use to indicate what OS I'm after. Anyone have any good suggestions? ( and no, Retrospect doesn't meet the "cheap/free" criterion)

Well you know what they say

[ellem]

You can't have good cheap and free or something...

Retrospect rules but it is not free.

Backup 3.0 is pretty sweet but somewhat .mac centric.

Superduper! is cheap and good.

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperD escription.html [shirt-pocket.com]

Re:Well you know what they say

[elmegil]

The way I've heard it: cheap, fast, reliable, pick two. I don't need fast :-)

Re:Well you know what they say

[Philip K Dickhead]

Ditto on SuperDuper!

It is also an aid in Piracy. Don't ask.

I love it - makes the whole Disk Utility do what it should.

Also look at SilverKeeper, FREE from La Cie. ahref=http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pi d=10097rel=url2html-12894 [slashdot.org]http://www.lacie.com/prod ucts/product.htm?pid=10097>
Really BIG firewire/NAS combos are cheep, thesedays. I use this for some very non-technical types - friends who do non-profit publishing for a charity. It saved a book from oblivion (or re-typing!)

Re:Well you know what they say

[elmegil]

I have what used to be a MythTV box that has, oh, either 180GB or 380GB, I forget which. Since the last time Myth bit my ass, I've decided I'm getting a Tivo (when I get off my butt) and repurpose the Myth box for some sort of NAS (MP3's, backups, etc).

Re:Well you know what they say

[Philip K Dickhead]

What went wrong on you with MythTV?

Re:Well you know what they say

[elmegil]

1) I use(d) KnoppMyth. I tried ages ago to install the CVS version and the instructions (at least at the time) were shit and I never could get it all working. KnoppMyth is pretty much plug and play. I did do a little customization, made a lvm volume for my /myth filesystem, but that's really irrelevant to my problem.

2) Every 6 months or so, I'd get behind in my watching, /myth would fill up, which would then fill up /var/log/messages bitching every few seconds, which would cause the system to lock up or

CCC

[BandwidthHog]

Carbon Copy Cloner [bombich.com] by Mike Bombich is pretty cool, and may work for you in this case:

Q: Can I use CCC to backup my drive to CDs?

A: Not directly. You can create a disk image, clone to the disk image, then burn the disk image to a CD. You will have to work out the details of 1) splitting the disk image to fit on CDs and 2) restoring the CDs to a volume. Check out http://bombich.com/mactips/asrx.html [bombich.com] [bad link] for a related suggestion. Note that inserting a blank disk in Mac OS X will create a blank disk imag