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

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

[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).

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

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.

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: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.