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

Retrospect

[MrGHemp]

http://www.emcinsignia.com/

We use it to back up our web and database servers. The high end products might be over kill but the Express version might do you right. Retrospect will compress the data to save drive space, and it allows you to restore via a date of your choice. Lots of scheduling and etc options. Works like a champ.

Re:rsync, bash script, calendar event

[xil]

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

Today shell scripts, tomorrow Time Machine

[Fulkkari]

I don't know about right now, but once Leopard comes out, I guess it would be Time Machine. Just wait until it starts shipping in the beginning of the next year.

If you don't want to wait or upgrade, write a shell script doing the job for you. I don't know what kind of experiences others have had with backup tools on the Mac, but Retrospect kept crashing on me when trying to run it. I wouldn't trust that kind of software to keep track of my backups. So I guess it's pretty much shell scripts or nothing right now.

Re:Cross-Platform Solution

[knappe duivel]

Most backup programs just copy the files, so you are in no way tight to, or dependant on such program. I do avoid programs like Retrospect, which compress the backups, forcing you to also use the program for restoring of browsing your backup data.

Re:rsync, bash script, calendar event

[iangoldby]

Here's my script. This is an amalgamation of several ideas that I easily found by searching the web. It keeps the last three copies, using links to avoid copying or storing twice any file that hasn't changed.

#!/bin/sh
 
# To use Apple's rsync switch commented lines below
# To use rsyncx:
# RSYNC=/usr/local/bin/rsync --eahfs --showtogo
# To use built-in rsync (OS X 10.4 and later):
RSYNC="/usr/bin/rsync -E -v"
 
DEST=/Volumes/Backups
 
# Function for toggling Spotlight indexing
spotlight_switch()
{
/usr/bin/mdutil -i $1 /
# /usr/bin/mdutil -i $1 /Volumes/Backups
}
 
# sudo runs the backup as root
# --eahfs enables HFS+ mode
# -a turns on archive mode (recursive copy + retain attributes)
# -x don't cross device boundaries (ignore mounted volumes)
# -S handle sparse files efficiently
# --showtogo shows the number of files left to process
# --delete deletes any files that have been deleted locally
# $* expands to any extra command line options you may give
 
# make sure we're running as root
# id options are effective (u)ser ID
if (( `id -u` != 0 )); then
{ echo "Sorry, must be root. Exiting..."; exit; }
fi;
 
! test -d $DEST && echo "Please mount the backup drive!" && exit
spotlight_switch off
 
rm -rf $DEST/backup.2
mv $DEST/backup.1 $DEST/backup.2
mv $DEST/backup $DEST/backup.1
 
$RSYNC -a -x -S --delete --link-dest=../backup.1 \
    --exclude-from backup_excludes.txt $* / /Volumes/Backups/backup
 
# make the backup bootable - comment this out if needed
 
bless -folder $DEST/backup/System/Library/CoreServices
 
spotli ght_switch on

My excludes file:

/tmp/*
/Network/*
/cores/*
*/.Trash
/afs/*
/a utomount/*
/private/tmp/*
/private/var/run/*
/p rivate/var/spool/postfix/*
/private/var/vm/*
/Pr evious Systems.localized
.Spotlight-*/
/Users/*/Library /Caches

The only 'issue' is that I don't seem to be able to boot from the backup, but this may be no bad thing, given that a backup is not supposed to be a mirror, nor a mirror a backup.

Any suggestions (or flames as to why my backup strategy will fail catastrophically) welcomed!

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Required reading

[pesc]

Backup on Mac is not as easy as one would think...

http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/03/05/the-stat e-of-backup-and-cloning-tools-under-mac-os-x/
http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/04/23/mac-back up-software-harmful/

Maybe TimeMachine will offer an interesting solution...

http://www.apple.com/se/macosx/leopard/timemachine .html

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!

Re:rsync, bash script, calendar event

[sribe]

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

If you don't mind resetting creation and modification times of every file (not just changed ones) on the backup every time you backup.

rdiff-backup creates and maintains a copy of not only the current data but also keeps reverse diffs so you can recover old versions too.

It's extremely fragile. Any interruption in any backup and it will leave things in a state where manual cleanup and starting the backup over from scratch is required.

Retrospect will compress the data to save drive space, and it allows you to restore via a date of your choice.

It works great when it works. But it also has a nasty tendency to corrupt its catalog files, forcing you to run a "repair" operation on you backups. For disk-based backups this is not too bad since it just takes time; for tape you get to feed in all the tapes in the set so it can read them. This bug has persisted across at least 3 paid upgrades now. Not everybody experiences it, and I don't know what conditions trigger it, but I've seen it at multiple sites with different setups.

As for SuperDuper, I've heard only good things about it. Seems to be a very solid little product for individual backup. I haven't tried it because I need network backup for multiple machines. (I'm so frustrated I'm about 90% of the way to deciding to write my own!)