[wataru]

I spent a long time last night figuring out how to do this, so I thought I'd share.

I wanted to keep a backup of my home directory on my iPod, and I wanted the backups to happen automatically when the iPod mounts. Also, I need farily fine control over what exactly gets backed up. It's all detailed here:
http://homepage.mac.com/amake/shared...ys/backup.html

Basically I made a shell script and then turned it into an app with Platypus. That may be child's play for some, but I had never done it before. It took a lot of legword checking out different apps, scouring the rsync manpage, and trial and error for me. I hope people find this useful.

[Randman]

You say that Backup is quite slow (which can be true). What does your script do in terms of time vs Backup? What other advantages/disadvantages are there between the two? I use backup for my iPod, then I drag and drop certain files (or work I'm doing on freelancing) and it's pretty quick and painless once the initial backup is complete.

[wataru]

Like I said in the article, the biggest reason I don't like Backup is that it doesn't delete files that are no longer present in the source. And for speed, I was mostly referring to UI speed--there's a big delay when it calculates how much space things take up, and I don't think there's a way to prevent it from doing that. I'll have to test actual backup speed, but my guess is that it's comparable or rsync is a bit faster.

But for me the real killer feature of my solution is the automation. I suppose you could have Peripheral Vision automatically open Backup, but again there's that delay where it calculates things, and Backup takes longer to load than a simple Platypus-generated app.

Plus, I won't have Backup anymore if I decide to cancel .Mac, whereas rsync is and always will be free.

Edit: Also, Backup doesn't support blocking rules. You could, for instance, choose not to sync the .DS_Store files with rsync, but that would be difficult, if not impossible, to do consistently with Backup.

[CatOne]

Originally posted by wataru:
I spent a long time last night figuring out how to do this, so I thought I'd share.

I wanted to keep a backup of my home directory on my iPod, and I wanted the backups to happen automatically when the iPod mounts. Also, I need farily fine control over what exactly gets backed up. It's all detailed here:
http://homepage.mac.com/amake/shared...ys/backup.html

Basically I made a shell script and then turned it into an app with Platypus. That may be child's play for some, but I had never done it before. It took a lot of legword checking out different apps, scouring the rsync manpage, and trial and error for me. I hope people find this useful.

I do this with "ChronoSync" -- it's trivially easy to do. I have an script which will do a differential update, and it runs whenever a disk is connected (I do it to an external firewire hard drive, though the iPod would work just as well). ChronoSync by default won't delete files from the target that you delete from the source, but there's a checkbox to enable this.

I've only been using ChronoSync for about 3 weeks, but I was tinkering with other utilities for about a year previously, and everything else bugged me in one way or another. ChronoSync absolutely rocks for backups!

[wataru]

Thanks for the tip about ChronoSync. I think I'd rather keep my $30, though.

[real]

NIce Very nice, Thanks for the article wataru.


real

[wataru]

Update: I managed to completely generalize the script, so now it will work with iPods of any name. I also bundled rsync itself into the app, so you don't even need to install RsyncX. All the details are in the article, but if you'd like to just try it out, feel free to download it.

Let me know if you find any problems with it. Of course I can't guarantee you that it won't destroy your computer and kill your family, so please use it at your own risk.

[york28]

I use Déjà Vu. It's not free, but it works well. It's basically a GUI wrapper for rsync.

Very cool article/script though- I'm going to check it out when I get home. I've never heard of Platypus, I'm going to go check it too.

[wataru]

iPodBackup is now officially out for public consumption on MacUpdate. I welcome any comments or suggestions.