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?"

rsync, bash script, calendar event

it's unix. except that cron isn't useful on a system that sleeps, and launchd is badly broken in several painful ways. anacron is supposed to be good, but i haven't looked into it.

Re:rsync, bash script, calendar event

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

Re:rsync, bash script, calendar event

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!

[[Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 25.1). Aenean orci mi, lacinia varius, varius in, suscipit ut, purus. Donec pharetra lorem nec odio. Mauris accumsan sem non pede. Etiam pulvinar eros at massa. Curabitur consectetuer. Pellentesque imperdiet cursus diam. Sed tincidunt nunc. Donec fermentum, nisl at hendrerit mollis, turpis leo consequat elit, volutpat condimentum velit augue facilisis nisl. Vestibulum dapibus ligula non turpis. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Nulla risus lorem, aliquet imperdiet, accumsan id, aliquet vel, tellus. Quisque mi dui, pulvinar ut, iaculis pharetra, rutrum eget, nisl. Aliquam et erat in sem dapibus vehicula. Curabitur rhoncus ipsum id dui. Nullam venenatis. Phasellus vitae sapien quis pede ultrices mollis.]]

Re:rsync, bash script, calendar event

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!)

backups

I use RsyncX (http://archive.macosxlabs.org/rsyncx/rsyncx.html) on the OSX server (10.3) in a lab I do some work in. It works well, and you can just set up cron jobs. Last I checked, the Rsync that comes with OSX wouldn't handle resource forks, which is why a third-party app is necessary. This may be fixed in newer versions of OSX, but since the lab isn't upgrading until 10.5 is released I have no experience with 10.4.

rdiff-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. You can backup to another hard driver or directory, or over a network. For remote backups, it uses the rsync protocol so it only transmits changes.

It's a command-line tool, so it's not very OSX'y, but it works very, very well. I use it to back up all of my machines, including some remote servers. I do it all with cron jobs, and all over network links, because that way I can just ignore it, but you can also run it manually if you prefer.

SuperDuper!

I'm a big fan of SuperDuper! since it's trivial to use, does incremental backups and you don't have to worry about missing files or applications if you mirror your entire hard drive.

If you have a firewire external hard drive, you can have SuperDuper! backup your computer's drive to it and if you should ever want to step back to your last backup or lose your laptop's hard drive, all you have to do is plug in the external drive, press option while you are starting up your mac, boot from the external drive, run SuperDuper! to copy all your files back and reboot normally when its done. You are left with a computer EXACTLY like it looked when you last backed up.

It can also handle drives of different sizes (assuming you aren't trying to copy 100GB of files to a 60GB drive) so you can also use it to upgrade your hard drive without needing to reinstall OSX or your applications.

I know it isn't FOSS, but it is still a reasonably priced, wonderful application and I reccomend it 100%

Cross-Platform Solution

I'd rather not use a backup solution "for Mac OS X". Instead, I'd use a solution that works on multiple platforms. The main argument for this is that I can still use the solution and access my old backups when I decide to switch platforms (and, consequently, that the backup solution isn't an impediment to switching). I also have the feeling that if software is used and maintained on multiple platforms, there is a lesser chance of it just being end-of-lifed one day than if the software is just for one platform - especially considering that the platform might also change radically (like Mac OS -> Mac OS X) or disappear. All in all, using cross-platform solutions gives me a greater sence of freedom and security.

Retrospect

http://www.emcinsignia.com/ [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.

Synchronize Pro X

Although it is on the expensive end of the backup software scale, Synchronize Pro X [qdea.com] is extremely versatile and has saved my bacon through a series of drive failures (that resulted in Apple replacing my PowerBook). I currently have it running 4 different scheduled backups on my system and have another backup set up that activates when I attach a certain thumb drive: it syncs a selected group of folders to the thumb drive and then unmounts the drive automatically. Plug, sync, unplug--very cool.

rsnapshot

I use rsnapshot [rsnapshot.org]. It's written in Perl, and uses rsync, so it should work on Mac OS X as well as it does on my Linux box. It's pretty configurable, and rotates backups hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, etc. It uses filesystem hardlinks to do incremental backups.

Today shell scripts, tomorrow Time Machine

I don't know about right now, but once Leopard comes out, I guess it would be Time Machine [apple.com]. 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.

Carbon Clone Copier

I just got a drive the same size as my internal hdd, and setup a scheduled clone of my drive, not as elegant, but if my drive dies, I just swap the new one in, and its like it never even died.

Required reading

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/ [plasticsfuture.org]
http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/04/23/mac-back up-software-harmful/ [plasticsfuture.org]

Maybe TimeMachine will offer an interesting solution...

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

[[requiring non-blank subjects is stupid]]

As many have pointed out, standard Unix backup tools aren't good on OSX.

Surprisingly, many OSX backup tools aren't either. There's an extensive comparison [plasticsfuture.org] of many different backup programs for OSX and it has lists of exactly what the programs will backup/restore and whether or not those things tend to be important.

file vault and scp

i use file vault on my work computer and used to have a crontab something like this for Documents and Library: /usr/bin/rsync -av ~/Documents serverUserName@serverName:/share/serverUserName/Do cuments/backupDir

i already had generated ssh keys and this worked well. i'd have it run three times a day.

however, i began to get thinking why encrypt my local home directory only to put it on the server unencrypted. so i've switched over to using scp to copy my entire file vault disk image once a week. i have gigabit enet from my computer and back to the server, so even a 15 gb image doesn't take too long.

Don't use Backup from dotMac!

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.

ChronoSync

I use ChronoSync [econtechnologies.com].

I'm happy to fiddle and tweak and produce home-brew solutions to many things, but not as the sole backup: The point of a backup program is to ensure that you have backed up exactly what you think you have backed up. ChonoSync provides a reliable and flexible back-up system. It is commercial ($30) -- which you may not like -- but they offer free updates to a reasonably priced product, and have been around for a while. Their customer service is also excellent: they provided a less restrictive demo for me to try, and provided a lost serial number in less than 24 hours. I have no affiliation; just a satisfied customer.

Retrospect

I back up my desktop, my PB, the wife's PB, my Dell, and my Linux server to an extra hard drive in my Desktop. Always been able to restore files that I've needed, and I've had to do one bare metal restore of my PB. Did a barebones install of 10.4.x on it, added the Retro client, clicked the mouse a few times...and came back to MY perfectly functioning PowerBook. A lot of people here will sneer at a commercial solution, but that restore paid for the software in my time and aggravation not spent.

Oh no, not again...

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 [plasticsfuture.org] and the earlier The State of Backup and Cloning Tools under Mac OS X [plasticsfuture.org] at plasticsfuture
• MacOS X Backups [dataexpedition.com] 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 [bombich.com], cheap SuperDuper! [shirt-pocket.com], and expensive Retrospect [emcinsignia.com]. 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!

Super Duper! and Unison

I use SuperDuper! [shirt-pocket.com] to make a clone of my boot partition on a FW drive. "Smart Update" is fast and if something goes bad, I can reboot on the external drive and work immediately, then take the time to fix it later. For important files, I use unison [upenn.edu] to a remote server via ssh, I prefer it over Rsync. Chronosync [econtechnologies.com] is nice to make automatic backups to external drives.

I don't see how Apple's Time Machine [apple.com] could make Super Duper! obsolete, at least for me. What if I can't boot anymore and needs to work now?

Deja Vu, it comes with toast

you can set it to back up over the network or to another drive, you can specify manual or automatic, and you can schedule different backups at different times. it's easy and quick.

harddisk no problem

For external drives, there is plenty of software around. iBackup is what I have installed and it does what you want.

What I'm looking for and haven't found yet is something that'll do backups over the network, and is not .Mac

similar question

I'm in a similar situation. I'm trying to help a fellow graduate student who recently accepted a postion at a univeristy set up his new office. He's decided that he wants to switch to all mac's and is looking for a way to keep his laptop and desktop in sync. I mentioned dotmac for bookmarks, addresses, mail, etc. but he's also looking for something that'll sync the files in his home directory as well. Basically he wants to use his desktop at work, press a button and have it sync everything to his laptop when he leaves, and then sync any of the work he did on the laptop back to the desktop when he gets back to the office. I've been looking through what I could find, but nothing I've found seems to be quite what he's looking for. Does anyone know of any way he could do this easily with existing software?

Shell scripts

As mentioned in another article, shell scripts are usually the best. I'll look at Time Machine when it comes out, but the very fact that it's OS X-specific would relegate it to a curiosity for me.

OS X provides "rsync," which is one of the best tools for the job, and it works on most (all?) Unix-based platforms as well as Windows (using Cygwin). With rsync, you should definitely look into the following options:

--exclude (exclude file name patterns from being backed up. You don't really nead your web cache or other temporary files backed up)

--backup and --backup-dir=dirname Allows rsync to do incremental backups. Use a different "dirname" every day, like "Volumes/USB Drive/Incremental/2006/12/16" (for those files that were modified on 16-Dec-2006). This way, you can have backups of works in progress... I can't tell you how many times these incrementals came in handy! You should also have a periodic process prune the incrementals, as they start to add up.

The nice thing is that rsync can work over a network, which means that you can have it transfer your data to a separate machine. Thus, it's possible to have off-site backup in case of disaster.

As far as other utilities are concerned, they probably work, and might be more suitable for you, since "rsync" is definitely command-line oriented (and scriptable).

Good luck, and here's an "atta boy!" for even thinking about backup solutions... most people don't until it's too late!

Deja vu of course

I always use Deja Vu and always keep returning to it: http://propagandaprod.com/ [propagandaprod.com]

It uses psync (like rsync but with resource forks etc.) and is generally brilliant. I simply create an incremental duplicate of my entire hard drive to an equally sized other hard drive every day at 6 PM.

Silverkeeper

Silverkeeper works great - I have it set up for most of the computers I support a work that don't use University network backups, and it's totally automated and will keep multiple copies on the external hard drive. A good review of it is on MacOSX Hints - http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040 421082847552 [macosxhints.com]

ChronoSync

from EconTechnologies [econtechnologies.com] is my choice. It's easy to use, supports archiving, and unattended operation. That's pretty much all I need. I back up my home folder with all my shtuff, and /usr/local where I have data and config files. Everything else in my world is downloadable, configurable, or forgotten. If I lose my hard drive once a year, I'll spend less time rebuilding then I would searching for and configuring a more advanced backup package.

atempo time navigator

I've been using time navigator for about 6 months now, very good enterprise backup and it really maximized the amount of tape and disk storage i have. my main complaint is there is no "bare metal" restore for osx, which would be nice for disaster recovery

Not practical for home use, but

For business and large organization use, a large government agency I used to work for first tried Retrospect. The whatever-it-is industrial strength version. We didn't have a very easy time of things, mostly minor technical issues that constantly plagued us, not generally with restoring, usually just with backups timing out, taking forever, jamming, etc.

We were finally given the go-ahead to try something new, and since our backup guy had been checking out Tivoli Storage Manager and really like it, we gave that a shot. I don't think I've ever had a smoother backup solution that worked for both our 800 Macs and our 900 PCs.

I've used NetBackup, Tivoli, and Retrospect, though I've never used NetBackup for Macs (we do at my current employer, but I've never touched it).

There's probably plenty of other good commercial backup solutions, but I have to admit that I was impressed. Things may have changed, since that was back in the 10.2 days, but who knows.

Built-in tools do just fine

Boot from an alternate volume (like a Tiger install DVD -- after you select the language, there's a "utilities" menu or something where you can run terminal and disk utility), and use "asr -source $SOURCEVOL -target $TARGETVOL -erase" where $SOURCEVOL is your boot drive and $TARGETVOL is a sparse diskimage on a Firewire or USB disk.

It's fast, it's a pure copy, and it doesn't modify the access times of files on $SOURCEVOL. Make sure you're booted from a different volume and you use the "-erase" flag, though, or it can't unmount $SOURCEVOL and does a file-level copy instead. It still works, but it's a lot slower (and I'm not sure if it's modifying last-access times or not).

Technically, you can do the same thing with Disk Utility, I think, but I've been using asr.

`man asr` for the gory details.

Retrospect if you're serious

The only backups that do any good are the ones that you actually make. I've tried various things that require doing by hand, going back to mounting 9 track tapes on PDP-11 tape drives in the seventies. I've made floppy, CD-ROM and DVD-RW backups on an intermittent basis. In general, when the time came for disaster recovery, the backups were too old to do any good. Unless you are far more conscientious than I am, completely automatic is the way to go.

I use Retrospect 6.1 to run nightly incremental backups of four Macs to two separate Linux machines on alternate nights (Raid 1 on the cheap, I guess). I do have to check every week or two to be sure that Retrospect hasn't wedged. The user interface is way too complicated, but I've come to terms with it over the last six or seven years. I used to have full backups scheduled, but they take quite a long time and frequently either wedged or took so long that they interferred with the other backups. I don't have super regular "off-site" backup, but my house hasn't burned down yet. (We all use laptops as our main computers, so I do keep an external drive at our vacation home and run backups when we take our laptops out there. )

I've not only recovered indivudual files accidentally deleted or damaged but recovered from three complete drive meltdowns with no loss of work in two cases and only a few hours worth in the third, so I consider it worth the time and money.

In summary, if you don't actually do the backups, you're toast. If your work or your time is worth money, you can't afford not to do backups, and you shouldn't hesitate to spend some money. And finally, if you haven't done a restore from your backups, it is practically guaranteed that they don't work.

Try Backuplist+

Backuplist+, available at the usual search engines in your neighborhood :-), is a pretty nice gui frontend to several backup options. You can select Finder-like copy/backup, rsync, ditto, and cpio IIRC. It's free/donationware, so I'd recommend at least reading thru the documentation to see if it'll do all you need.

I have used Impression and SuperDuper

I used Impression for over a year and really liked it. I used it because it did verification of the data written and this feature was very important to me. Unfortunately, Impression became an orphan and I switched to SuperDuper.

Fortunately, Impression has a new parent and is no longer an orphan. You can buy it at http://www.ineedyoursoftware.com/ [ineedyoursoftware.com] .

I am sticking with SuperDuper for now as it extremely easy to use.

Both programs back up to standard Mac files so retrieval is not dependent upon any special software.

Amanda or other UNIX backup software

I like Amanda because it's completely automated once you set it up... you don't have to keep track of whether you're doing full or incremental dumps. But there's all kinds of alternatives, and any UNIX backup software that can be configured to use hfstar or hfspax to catch the extra HFS+ attributes can accomodate a Mac as well.

tolisgroup bru le

retrospect is no longer a viable option for mac. many people have moved to tolisgroup bru (server or "le" for local backups). the unix toolset has been around for many years and is used in many mission critical environments. the mac osx gui is the result of a formal request from nasa for a mac version. :) http://www.tolisgroup.com/press/2006/09.25.html [tolisgroup.com] we have bru server deployed at many locations. it does disk-to-disk-to-tape backups easily (d2d2t). incrementals are individual stage files (unlike retrospect that keeps jamming incrementals into the same growing file that inevetibly corrupts/implodes). the gui is maturing...and tolisgroup is the kind of company that follows the old unix rule...each tool does one task and does it well. bru does backups well...and restores well. don't expect any marketing hype from them, just solid, dependable backups AND restores. don montalvo, nyc curmudgeon at large

Déjà Vu - For my money !!

For my money Déjà Vu [propagandaprod.com] has done it quick dirty and simple. I've seen this run for 3 years not be touched and have no issues. Not really a enterprise solution but great for home & professional users who don't want to shell script things.
-ZuCom [zucom.com]

.Mac?

Can't you just set up the folders that you want to sync with .Mac and store the files over there? I guess if you have gigs and gigs, you probably aren't backing that up every month anyway. Better to burn all that pr0n...rather, legally purchased iPr0n...rather, legally purchased iTunes content and your family photos and movies onto DVDs for your archives. Really depends what you are backing up, how much of it there is, how frequently and quickly you need to access it, and if you care who sees it.

Several Options

SuperDuper is nice. Personally, I use Synk Backup from decimus [decimus.net]. There's also Retrospect for professional backup, and of course, Mac OS X 10.5 will include its own Backup functionality called Time Machine [apple.com].

Avoid Apple's current Backkup app, as it sucks.

psyncx

psyncx [sourceforge.net] is a graphical front end to psync and works quite well.

at my last job, i backed up a machine using retrospect and an exabyte loader and it was weeks of headaches. nothing went right at all.

psyncx doesn't have the complex options of something like retrospect, but it's perfect for the user of a single machine who wants a basic backup - selected folders or drives copied to another location - done on a schedule of manually, using inexpensive shareware software.

Bacula

Use Bacula. Support for HFS+ resource forks, and many other useful features one comes to love about backup software (when one must use it). http://www.bacula.org/ [bacula.org]

or try

Retrospect - should do everything you're asking of it.

Free Backup Solution

Yeah, shell scripts are good, but I recommend going to lacie.com and downloading their one step backup software for OS/X -- which is freeware. and... it retains your file permissions to boot. It doesn't offer compression, or advanced features, just copies to any removable or non-removable device. I fyou have an external FW you will love it. enjoy!

Phew! (from Substance Software)

I use Phew [substancesoftware.com]. It's basically a GUI on top of rsync. Very simple and work's nicely if you're not looking for much.

Don't forget off site backup

I have a "system" for backups which includes:

1. Nightly rsync of my iMac and powerbook to a hard disk connected via firewire to my iMac (runs from cron)

2. Plans to install rsnapshot [rsnapshot.org] to shorten the window of exposure from 1 day to 1 hour. Used to use this on Linux with great success, fully expect that this will work well on OS X.

3. I bought 2 firewire/USB drive enclosures, and populated them with PIDE drives. I keep one, and gave my sister one. The enclosures are identical and the drives are partitioned with one Windows partition and one OS X partition. When I see my sister (a few times/year) we trade enclosures. I rsync my home movies/pictures/music to the OS X partition, and she uses the "freeware" SyncBack [2brightsparks.com] to back up her data

The only down side to this approach is that I'm limited in backup size to ~140GB unless I'm willing to pony up for a pair of SERIOUS TB sized drives. In general it's not a big deal - I suppose I could end up losing my home movies of my kids - that's what really eats up disk space. Guess I need to archive my tapes to the safe deposit box. :)

The idea that I'll be able to easily recover my data if my house burns down brings me great comfort. The cost is fairly minimal and the level of effort is pretty low, too.

Re:The best one is a command line tool.

Come on - that's just mean. I might've modded funny but somebody might actually try it.

SilverKeeper is actually more flexible than that

SilverKeeper (a free-as-in-beer download from LaCie [lacie.com]) is actually more flexible than you might think. If you look into the advanced options, you'll notice that you can set exclusions (such as ~/Library/Caches when you back up your home directory, or other individual files/folders). It's more of a file synchronization utility than a back-up solution, but it can be scheduled to run automatically, and it's much friendlier than, say, rsync.

Re:My rsync setting for backup works great!

I usually back up via rsync over ssh to my Linux file server which I keep in my basement. It works great. You could also send all of your data to an offsite server this way too incase you ever had a fire in your house/apartment. This solution is also cross platform. I would also take a look at rdiff-backup which uses rsync but it also is made for backing things up. It lets you store all of the changes on a daily basis (and it only records the changes). Restoring data is as easy as running it in reverse specifying a day or time or revision number. I use this method at the company that I'm head of IT for to backup OS X boxes, Ubuntu boxes and Windows XP/Server 2003 boxes on a daily basis to a file server which has an external USB2 hard disk.