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

[dbc]

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.

backups

[nelomolen]

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

[swillden]

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.

Re:rsync, bash script, calendar event

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't work. Resource forks kill all things unixy in Mac OS. Restore from a rsynced directory and you will find quite a few things don't work.

Re:rsync, bash script, calendar event

[xil]

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

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/ [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]

Re:Retrospect

[Anonymous Coward]

We have been using Retrospect Server on Mac OS X Server for a couple of years to backup both Mac OS X, Linux workstations and servers. We've generall had a very hard time with the software.

- seemingly random instances of Retrospect grabbing all available CPU time (when no backup is active) and continuing to suck CPU time until the application is force-quit. Other people seem to be struggling with this as well (google for Retrospect LaunchCFMA)

- Retrospect recognizing our tape auto-loader but not the tape drives themselves. Restarting Retrospect usually fixes this.

- E-mail notifications exist, but not in a useful format. We have not yet found a good way to be actively alerted when a backup fails, while not getting flooded with backup report e-mail messages containing mostly superfluous data. We have found no way to integrate Retrospect status into our existing monitoring systems.

- Since being purchased by EMC, the Retrospect for Windows product seems to be getting a lot of attention, while the Retrospect for Mac OS X product seems to have fallen by the wayside.

I would not recommend retrospect to anyone backing up any sizeable number of machines. Just my $.02...

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 [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!

Deja Vu, it comes with toast

[k3v0]

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.

ChronoSync

[varontron]

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.

Re:SuperDuper!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not. If your primary fs is totally borked, time machine is no help.

All you have to do is reinstall Leopard on the primary drive and plug in your old Time Machine drive during the installation when it asks. Not the same as a bootable clone, but clearly a step up.

Re:Don't use Backup from dotMac!

[Therin]

That's a major bummer. My experience is quite different, over the last couple of years I've used dotMac Backup.app three or four times to restore things, and it's worked just fine.

Re:Retrospect

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks AC. I am not imagining things at work. The OS X Retrospect Servers even 6.1 need to be constantly looked at. I find them stuck on clients and yes the high CPU load is just silly (even tried some much better mac hardware and yep it is still there).

The reports are so silly I've rigged up a system to use a database to load them into that I can query..

I have no problem with any restores, just silly stuff such as Net Retrys and having to reinstall Retrospect Clients.

On the other hard the Windows version 7.5 works pretty well without all the Mac problems (you can add clients while it carries on backing up a client..)

You have to "hand hold" the product .. and this is only for 300 or so Macs and PCs over 4 servers.

Re:My rsync setting for backup works great!

[jimmy_dean]

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.