BRU LE for Mac OS X

GraWil wonders: "The Tolis Group has just released BRU LE for Mac OS X. It is far more reasonably priced than the professional version but it is still priced well above the personal edition for Linux and BSD users. Does anyone have experience they can share about strategies for backing up Powerbook and Desktop Mac I am using a total of 140GB of the 180GB available)?"

Comments

another slow apple news day...

[sleepypants]

External HD is the way to go...especially if you have a new-ish mac, you can go either USB 2.0 or IEEE1394. I broke apart the case of my 1394 external HD to plug in various hard drives I had lying around. Not pretty, but works for me...

Re:Why would I use this over Dantz Retrospect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I checked this out about a month ago as an alternative to Retrospect, but it appears to be far less versatile and far more complicated to set up.

I didn't even look at the pricing, but shit, $99 per client makes Dantz's prices look reasonable, you got that right.

Rsync

[reconbot]

Its free, its pretty simple, and it works fast.

Try this out for size.

sudo rsync -v -a --progress --delete ~/ /Volumes/Yourbackupdrive/home/

Re:Rsync

[Graff]

Its free, its pretty simple, and it works fast.

And it doesn't copy resource forks or Finder data so it can mangle copies on Mac OS X pretty easily...

Don't use rsync on Mac OS X unless you don't mind possibly corrupting your files irreversibly. Instead you could either roll your own solution by doing copies with the ditto command, which has an option to preserve resource forks and metadata, or you can get RsyncX, a rsync implementation that does handle these sort of issues correctly. You can learn a little more about copying and backing up files in this MacDevCenter article.

Re:Why would I use this over Dantz Retrospect?

[yummyporkproducts]

Because retrospect is a worthless piece of shit. We struggled with it for years, because it was the only backup option that supported tape on OS X. It had a problem with just not running on schedule, quitting mid-backup, and others. Retrospect doesn't even support the APPLE Xserve RAID, for pete's sake (or didn't until the latest version, 6, which is a paid upgrade for a product that never worked well in the first place). BRU works well - we've found that it backups and restores reliably, and we can script it from the command line.

Re:Backup on Mac OS X

[norkakn]

it comes with bash

Welcome to Darwin!
[Jonathan-Dobbies-Computer:~] jsdobbie% bash
Jonathan-Dobbies-Computer:~ jsdobbie$ ps
PID TT STAT TIME COMMAND
573 std S 0:00.06 -tcsh
581 std S 0:00.00 bash
Jonathan-Dobbies-Computer:~ jsdobbie$

it just isn't the default shell

Jonathan-Dobbies-Computer:~ jsdobbie$ ls /bin/*sh /bin/bash /bin/sh /bin/zsh /bin/csh /bin/tcsh
Jonathan-Dobbies-Computer:~ jsdobbie$

Re:Backup on Mac OS X

[jo_ham]

The versions of OS X prior to Panther (10.0 up to 10.2) shipped with tcsh as the default shell.

Apple changed the default to bash in 10.3 (although if you did an upgrade or an archive and install to go from 10.2 > 10.3 it kept tcsh as your shell for continuity's sake).

Re:Backup on Mac OS X

[JJSpreij]

I do not believe that all OS X come with bash

both Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2) and Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) come with bash installed; and in Panther, it is the default shell.

for a simple backup script, bash is not essential of course, though if you prefer it's easy to install in 10.1 or earlier. (Upgrading to 10.3 is an even beter idea ;-)

Apple also offers its .Mac subscribers a backup program called... wait for it... Backup ! But that's more suited for simpler needs, probably doesn't support tape drives let alone tape jukeboxes/auto-loaders.

Unix scripts, rsync and external harddisks may be cheaper, but I for one welcome more "industrial-strenght" options, simply because it helps with platform mindshare.

RSyncX for resource forks

[JJSpreij]

the default rsync included with OS X isn't aware of resource forks at all...

RSyncX will copy resource forks, but only to another OS X system running RSyncX with a HFS(+) filesystem.

Carbon Copy Cloner

[SimonDorfman.com]

Carbon Copy Cloner works very well. I just did a backup of my powerbook to an external firewire drive using CCC before sending the powerbook in for repair. Now I'm booting from the firewire drive on my old iMac until I get my powerbook back. Seemless. http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/ 13260M

Forgot to mention, CCC is $5 shareware

[SimonDorfman.com]

Forgot to mention, CCC is $5 shareware

Re:Backup on Mac OS X

[Graff]

As I mentioned in an earlier post be very careful with some of the copying/archiving utilities that come with Mac OS X. Many of them are not intended to copy Mac files, these utilities often strip metadata and resource forks and end up ruining files.

Instead you need to use alternate tools included with Mac OS X such as ditto, CpMac, and hdiutil. There are also 3rd party utilities such as the tar replacement hfstar (located at the bottom of the page), and the rsync replacement RsyncX.

Nice if you don't have resource data.

[solios]

Which things like Photoshop still write out with their files, and which tar gleefully ignores. Tar and Stuff a site directory: untar, you have a bunch of Safari-defaulted HTML and a bunch of Imageviewer JPEGs. Unstuff and you have Dreamweaver HTML and Photoshop and Fireworks JPEGS (which is damned useful for determining which have been optimized).

Don't get me wrong, Tar is dandy- but not for resource-fork sensitive files and applications. Which is why I still do incremental DVD-R burns and have piles of CD-Rs full of data, not to mention hard drive images- I'm tied to my FILE and CREATOR typecodes. :)

Re:Why would I use this over Dantz Retrospect?

[netsrek]

Retrospect has been problematic for a lot of people in OS X.

It may be idiot-simple, but it's horrendously single-threaded, and still doesn't run properly as a daemon.

Don't go bagging people out just because your own personal anecdotes don't support their point of view. OS X Server admins have been clamouring for better solution than Retrospect for years

use psync

[noisia]

psync is a great, easy to use tool for backing up OS x. It copies resource forks, and makes a fully bootable copy of the hard disk. Easy to script it into your /etc/daily file as well. I believe that ccc is a front end to psync as well.

not a shill, just a happy camper.

http://www.dan.co.jp/cases/macosx/psync.html

Re:Backup on Mac OS X

[Hungus]

HFStar will however pickup resource forks you can install it seperately or with fink. On the plus side the source is full available and it is of course GOL compliant.

Re:Why would I use this over Dantz Retrospect?

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Fred: you might grab a clue. It's really great that you got it working with a Beige G3 in 1998, but the parent poster specifically mentioned Apple's Xserve RAID. Did you know, for instance, that until this very latest version of Retrospect, that it couldn't work with 1TB volumes?

Depending on how you set up your RAID, that would make it incompatible with the Xserve RAID on that issue alone. If you had signed that PO, I guess it'd be you that'd be looking for another career, and for the justifiable offense of talking out your ass.

Some other useful standard tools

[rohanl]

You might want to look at: /usr/bin/ditto copy files and directories to a destination directory /usr/sbin/asr Apple Software Restore
Read the man pages for more info. Both these are standard in Mac OS X (Panther at least, not sure about older releases) and handle resource forks properly.

asr is actually the command line backend that the Software Restore Disk that shipped with your computer uses.

Amanda + HFStar

[tim1724]

At work I use amanda and hfstar to back up my PowerMac G5 using our amanda backup server (which also handles our Solaris and Linux boxes). It works pretty well, although it takes some work to set up.

If you've already got amanda set up for other machines, it's not too much work to add a Mac OS X box to your amanda setup.

If you only have one machine which you want to back up, then amanda is overkill.