[booboo]

Can anyone recommend a simple set it and forget it scheduled incremental back-up utility?

I want to back-up the contents of selected folders - i.e. my Home folder and various additional drives to an external FireWire drive, only writing the files that have changed since the previous backup.

I'd be particularly impressed if the utility could unmount and spin-down this drive after back-up.

Any thoughts?

[angelmb]

I would check the new version of SuperDuper!

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/13803

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDup...scription.html

[Jellytussle]

Just remember that a backup you never check may well be worthless when you need it most. I keep meaning to print up some t-shirts with "Your backup is only as good as your last restore" to hand out to clients who don't bother with a backup policy. BRU LE will let you script mount and unmount events if you can deal with a bit of work in the shell.

[G. I.]

Originally Posted by booboo

Can anyone recommend a simple set it and forget it scheduled incremental back-up utility?
I want to back-up the contents of selected folders - i.e. my Home folder and various additional drives to an external FireWire drive, only writing the files that have changed since the previous backup.
I'd be particularly impressed if the utility could unmount and spin-down this drive after back-up.

I use PsyncX it does the scheduled incremental copies with a simple GUI to set the sources and targets. It won't unmount the drive but as it uses /etc/crontab for scheduling you can place mount/unmount commands into the crontab manually. You need admin rights to use this method.

[chris v]

Deja Vu and Carbon Copy Cloner can both also be automated. CCC will only work with folders at the root level, though. Deja Vu has a decent interface and you can dig down into directories to select the folder to back up, but it's a lot slower for some reason.

[Kristoff]

I use the Ronco Easy Bake Backup Oven.

My backups come out perfectly baked in half the time!!!

[chris v]

Originally Posted by Kristoff

I use the Ronco Easy Bake Backup Oven.

My backups come out perfectly baked in half the time!!!

Data-transfer rates with that thing have to be awful. It only turns at maybe 8 or 10 rpm.

[natural1]

Check out Synchonize! X Plus from Qdea.

I've been using this for a year and it does everything a good backup tool should do, including unmount the drive on completion of the script. The inteface is pretty straight foward and the tech support is awesome. You can check out the demo for a limited number of files.

They also offer a Pro version, but I didn't think the extra features were worth the price.

Best of luck to ya!

[booboo]

Thank you all for your suggestions. I'm checking 'em out . . .

[moonmonkey]

I use apple backup to write incremental weekly backups to an external hard drive.
It works fantastically and completely transparently, only updating what's changed.

[rehoot]

Here is a command that will grab all the files changed in the last day and put them in a tar file on an external hard drive with a volume name of "LACIE." I added some restrictions on the find command to exclude directories that contain swap files and hot system files that would be locked anyway (and cause tar to fail).

This should be run from the root directory with an administrator ID:

cd /

sudo find / -ctime 1 -and -type f -and ! \( -path '/Volumes*' -or -path '/private*' -or -path '*Caches*' -or -path '/dev*' -or -path '/Library*' \)|sed -e 's/ /\\ /g' -e "s/'/\\\'/g" -e 's/"/\\"/g'|xargs tar -ignore-failed-read -rf /Volumes/LACIE/tartest1.tar -C /

Part of the command calls the "sed" program, which is a Stream EDitor that can replace embedded spaces in a filename with an escape sequence that tar understands. In other words, an embedded space is converted to "\ " (a slash and a space). I also converted single and double quotes, but if you have other odd characters in a filename, it may cause a problem for tar (I knew a guy who created a filename with an embedded star on an HP-UX machine).

The xargs program takes the list of filenames found by the "find" command and gives them to tar as a list of arguments so that tar can tar them.

As an earlier poster noted, your backup is only as good as your last restore, so practice restoring from your files. Another note is that I did not zip my tar file, and I didn't do that since it is a pain to scan the zipped tar files when you want to find a filename. If you want to zip the big tar files, you may also want to copy the find command that you used, and create an index file that contains all the files that you tared. I mini version of this would be:

find / -ctime 1|xargs ls -al >/Volumes/LACIE/Index1.txt

(except you would use the same "find" criteria that you used in the tar command)

You can put all of this in a script and append the date to the filenames; it would look something like this (inside a shell script file):

date=`date '+%Y%m%d'`
Fname="/Volumes/LACIE/ArchiveDaily$date"".tar"

and then you can use the Fname variable later:

tar -cf $Fname (other_options_go_here)

Also note that you may want to use a program called xtar by a company called Helios. This will save more of the extended file information that is used in the Mac OS X gui (like file colors). As I posted earlier today, I seem to need DiskWarrior to restore those colors, but this is probably not a big deal anyway.

[Cadaver]

I also use Apple's Backup 3.01. I'm a .mac subscriber, so it works pretty well for me.
Backs up smaller items like my Address Book, iCals, Sticky Notes, Keychains, Safari bookmarks and a few misc. files to my iDisk, and backs up my whole home folder to an external drive, both nightly. When my external gets low on space (about every two months), I save out any particularly important files to a couple 8.5GB DVD+R/DL, then clear out the incremental backups on my external drive and start over.

[EmmEff]

Is there any clone app that will create ISO images for permanent archival?

I keep a "live" backup on an external Firewire drive but I would really like to make a permanent copy every month as well.

[wataru]

I use my own iPodBackup. You can use it with any kind of disk, not just an iPod.

[- - e r i k - -]

Originally Posted by Cadaver

I also use Apple's Backup 3.01. I'm a .mac subscriber, so it works pretty well for me.
Backs up smaller items like my Address Book, iCals, Sticky Notes, Keychains, Safari bookmarks and a few misc. files to my iDisk, and backs up my whole home folder to an external drive, both nightly. When my external gets low on space (about every two months), I save out any particularly important files to a couple 8.5GB DVD+R/DL, then clear out the incremental backups on my external drive and start over.

What he said. I also send my purchased music to my iDisk after losing a few albums worth in a harddisk crash.

[bbales]

I use BounceBack, which came originally with an ABS external drive and which I then also got with an external Seagate Drive. It reminds you when you haven't done a backup in a week and you can set up certain "sets," such as a full backup, or maybe just a couple folders.

I also use chronosync for syncing my laptop and desktop -- that's what I use it for but I believe it also does just normal backups.