Backing Up a Mac
On the approximately third anniversary of the break-in to my home and my wedding anniversary, yesterday I decided it would be a good idea to back up the data on my mac. I have been backing up the family photos and video through foldershare. Some of my folders which contain business planning material, email, notes or mind-maps on aspects related to running the household or other projects have not been backed up. I actually bought a USB drive from Costco a few months ago for this purpose and never got around to plugging it in until a few days ago.
This is a backup script that I came up with to back up to a locally connected USB drive named dougransom.backup, that needs to be run from an account with admin privileges.
#!/bin/sh
sudo /usr/bin/rsync -a -E -H -S --delete --delete-excluded --progress /Users /Volumes/dougransom.backup/backupdoodle
Noteworthy is that there are two different rsyncs installed on mac osx. The one you want to use for backups is not the one that is in the default path. How confusing is that? The -E option is important for mac backups, and the one in /usr/local/bin doesn’t support it (you will see an error “rsync: -E: uknown option).
I think this process is way to hard to set up. I think something more reasonable would be:
- Use a UI to select a set of files backed up, and one or more destinations
- Schedule or create a shortcut so the user can backup whenever they feel like
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How are users who own macs and don’t know what “sudo /usr/bin/rsync -a -E -H -S –delete –delete-excluded –progress /Users /Volumes/dougransom.backup/backupdoodle” means currently backing up their macs? You shoudn’t have to hire
a unix admin to backup a home computer.
Technorati Tags: foldershare, osx, mac, backup, rsync, usability
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October 16th, 2006 at 6:04 am
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