[Blue Flame]

hey folks,
i'm looking for a free yet reliable program to backup my system. I know of retrospect and have heard good things about it but unfortunately i'm too broke to pay for software right now........is there anything reliable out there?

[- - e r i k - -]

Yeah, I hear Finder burns CDs and DVDs now

[Mithras]

If you're backing up to a Firewire disk or a network disk, look no futher than RSyncX. It's fast, it's free, and it's very reliable.

As for CDs/DVDs, I'm not sure. I just do an occasional backup by hand to disc...

[Appleman]

Carbon Copy Cloner

[Blue Flame]

yes, i'm aware that finder burns cds/dvds, thanks hehe

thanks for the link to CarbonCopy, I'll give that a try..........looking for something more automated etc................

[Krypton]

Lacie Silver Keeper is a great little app (free, carbon) that lets you backup items by specifying pairs of source and backup folders.

So in my case, I plug in my Firewire drive, hit "Go" and it backs up all of my files in one go, with the option to replace older files or accumulate files.

[pinlo]

You should give Déjà Vu a try. It's almost free.

[Appleman]

Originally posted by pinlo:
It's almost free.

Almost? ...

[Nebrie]

Originally posted by Blue Flame:
yes, i'm aware that finder burns cds/dvds, thanks hehe

thanks for the link to CarbonCopy, I'll give that a try..........looking for something more automated etc................

You can automate CarbonCopy. I set mine to backup my home directory to a firewire drive every saturday morning, and it does.

[Blue Flame]

Cool, I'll give CC a try, I installed Deja Vu but if CC does it just as good for free so be it

[pinlo]

Originally posted by Blue Flame:
if CC does it just as good for free so be it

By that logic, you should be running Linux rather than OS X. "It does it just as good" isn't good enough for most Mac users.

[Blue Flame]

hahaha, good point. xcept i'm not familiar with linux. when i have the time i might just do that

[Sven G]

I wonder if Mike Bombich's famous utilities (CCC, NetRestore, etc.) will be "Watsoned" (incorporated) into Panther: AFAIK, he now works at Apple - and the utilities are really good and reliable, so they would be an excellent part of a standard OS X installation...

[Mithras]

May I put in another good word for RSyncX.

It does well-compressed incremental backups, which CCC only does sometimes. And it's free.

And it's very easy to script -- after installing, I just add lines to my /etc/daily.local like this:

Code:
time rsync --archive --verbose --compress "/Users/mithras/Documents/" "/Volumes/Backup/mithras/Documents"

And it runs very easily over SSH -- which is a great way to back up a laptop whever it's around. I have a cron run every 15 minutes that checks whether my laptop is available via Rendezvous; and if it is, and my laptop has not yet been backed up today, it backs it up via SSH.