Backup Solutions for Mac OS X?

SpartanVII asks: "I purchased a Mac roughly two years ago and have made the switch with a fair amount of ease. However, one thing that has troubled me is how best to backup my important data to an external hard drive. Right now, I have rigged up an Automator workflow that runs every night, but I have also seen software options like SuperDuper and Knox. Since the Automator workflow lacks much of the flexibility and features available with these apps, I am ready to try something else. What app have you come across that provides the best backup solution?"

Comments

Re:rsync, bash script, calendar event

[xil]

On OS X, rsync -E will copy resource forks and extended attributes. Works fine for backup.

Don't use Backup from dotMac!

[wembley fraggle]

I used the Backup application from dotMac faithfully for over a year. Ran well every night, backing up my system. Then, my computers were stolen. No problem, they were insured and I had a backup. These things happen. I got my new Macintosh and went to Backup.app to restore. Selected everything and hit restore.

Backup crashed.

Tried again. Crashed again.

Backup won't restore more than one or two files at a time without crashing. It seems to be a memory leak, as it dies during a memory allocation routine. Granted, I had a lot of files and a lot of incrementals. But this is the JOB OF BACKUP! To be able to RESTORE my FILES! The files are there, I can see them (each backup file has a disk image inside it which you can mount manually). I just can't get at them systematically.

So, I contacted Tech Support. Got something like "wow, that's strange", sent my logs and such. It's been two weeks and I've heard nothing. My followup emails go into the bit-bucket.

By now, it would have been easier for me to have spent the last four nights manually mounting disk images and copying files over by hand.

Needless to say, I'm going with Retrospect as soon as I have something to backup again. Cancelling my dotMac account too.

Oh no, not again...

[gidds]

This seems to have been discussed in many places over the last couple of months.

I'm no expert, but I can point you to a couple of interesting web pages by people who do seem to know a lot of the details:

• Mac Backup Software Harmful and the earlier The State of Backup and Cloning Tools under Mac OS X at plasticsfuture
• MacOS X Backups at Seth's Unix Tips

In short, there are lots of different backup and cloning tools, from the Unix cp, ditto, and rsync commands up to the free Carbon Copy Cloner, cheap SuperDuper!, and expensive Retrospect. And very few of them preserve everything. HFS+ carries a lot of baggage from the old Mac OS, and adds a lot more stuff from Unix: there are resource forks, HFS+ extended attributes, BSD flags such as creation date and owner/group permissions, ACLs, symbolic links, aliases, and lots more -- and almost none of the options can preserve all of those.

You also need to think about what your backups are for and how much time and money you're prepared to expend: for some, burning a few personal files to CDR every few months will suffice, whereas for others an external HD holding a complete clone is the thing, and power users may need daily or weekly incremental backups with the ability to retrieve any file going back years.

Personally speaking, I'm in the middle category, with a large external Firewire HD holding a clone of each of my drives, which I redo every month or so. (Having it bootable is also a good idea, and has saved my bacon at least once!) I've mostly been using Carbon Copy Cloner, which has given good results, but I've recently switched to SuperDuper! which is cheap and seems to preserve absolutely everything. But don't take my word for it: read the linked pages, work out your needs, and make up your own mind.

But DO think about it! Disaster WILL strike in some form or other; disks DO fail (as I know to my cost), and you need to plan for it. It's not a question of how much time or money you can afford to spend; it's a question of how much data you can afford to lose!