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

Why would I use this over Dantz Retrospect?

[Anonymous Coward]

$99 PER CLIENT?? I thought Retrospect's pricing was awful, but these guys really take the cake. For $99 I could buy every machine on the network a second hard drive and just clone to it.

This product doesn't even support the APPLE superdrive, for pete's sake.

Re:Why would I use this over Dantz Retrospect?

[FredFnord]

I don't know what product YOU used, but I have used Retrospect to back up:

1) My five computer home network
2) A 25-Mac-and-8-PC development network
3) A network of about 100 computers, mixed Mac and PC

At various times, with various versions. Perhaps you used someone's personal machine which was off 2/3 of the time or whatever, but installed on a server (on a beige G3 web server, a Quadra 700 (in 1998!), and a Mac IIci (in 1994) respectively) it always worked just fine for me. Especially compared to what I'm trying to get to work now, a Computer Associates piece of junk Windows app with a lousy UI which only appears to send email notifications of missed backups when IT wants to.

Maybe you should consider a different career, if you really had that much trouble with Retrospect.

-fred

looking for good mac backup software

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been trying to find good software for backing up the mac too..

Retrospect Express works, and that's what I currently use, but it suffers from typical closed-source problems. They ported it to Mac OS X but didn't improve the interface which is still a little awkward. The whole architecture of the program is still geared around OS9 single-user. And it doesn't correctly archive Unicode filenames (I had a bunch on my hard drive and finally gave up and renamed them all english). It also only supports FTP for remote backups, not SFTP/SSH or rsync. Basically it seems "stuck" in its current feature set.

BRU?? I tried installing that on my Linux machine a long time ago, it didn't come in any package and it littered the hard drive with "hidden license files" which had backspaces in the names to hide themselves. I don't know what it does on the Mac, but no thanks.

I have a big RAID server where I back up all my Unix machines with rsync. What I really want is to back up my Mac the same way. But I'm not aware of any rsync that will correctly copy resource forks to a filesystem that doesn't use them natively.

There is a Mac OS X rsync, but it only copies resource forks to other Macs, as far as I know. Not to a non-HFS filesystem.

What I really really would love is an rsync that copies the resource forks to hidden files the same way the Mac copies them to non-HFS partitions already. So I could mount the backup directory via NFS and all the resource forks would be recognized.

I have considered the option of mounting the backup dir via NFS, and using resource-fork-aware rsync locally to the NFS directory, but would rather do it over the network.

Are there any rsync ports that do this??

Re:Backup on Mac OS X

[burns210]

could be a very successful and simple freeware app to release. some nice gui for using tar, bzip2, and even rsync with the option of uploading to a ftp server somewhere.

BRU is a good idea for multi-Unix sites

[csoto]

BRU is one of the commonly-available utilities for various flavors of Unix. If it works for your other platforms, having your X boxes on it makes sense.

Now, what's with all the Retrospect bashing? It works great for us and has been getting better every quarter or so. It's certainly a lot easier to use than most Unixy backup/recovery utilities, even under Linux and Solaris, which we use it with.