JJB Blog

Okay, after months and years of wanting a good backup solution, searching the net, and trying various scripts and shareware, I still don’t have a simple effective backup solution.

I have a .mac account (It’s overpriced and kind of flakey, I know I know) and with it comes Backup. Backup used to be pretty weak, but the newest version, version 3, Is put together pretty darn well in most regards. The interface is simple and functional, the preset backup plans are handy for novice users (I even use a couple of them myself), and it can handle incremental backups to disk or network, and backups that span multiple CDs or DVDs.

One place where it is sorely lacking is in the way it does incremental backups. If a file has changed since the last time you backed up, it makes a new copy of the entire file, instead of just the differences between the two files. So if you are working on a 3 gig file and only make 100k worth of changes every day, Backup will make another copy of your 3 gig file every day, which of course eats up your storage space very quickly.

If you don’t mind loosing a week’s worth of incremental backups, you can wipe all of your backups (including the original) and start over once a week, but there is no way to automate this.

Another problem is that as far as I can tell, it uses no compression whatsoever.

So I have decided to roll my own backup solution using rsync. There are a lot of these floating around out there, but they all seem to have more features or environment requirements than I need or want to deal with.

My system will have 2 scripts.

1. A script which either I or a cron job runs every day or so, and does a compressed rsync on my home directory, excluding certain directories (Music, Library/Caches, Desktop/downloads, and tmp).
2. A script that I run once a month or so, which makes a copy of the archive created by the first script, splits it into DVD sized chunks, and makes a .dmg out of each one, which I can then use Finder or Toast to burn to disk.

This solution actually won’t solve the incremental problem, because I am no longer making incremental backups. But if I am not mistaken, the only way to make a complete new backup each day using Backup, without doing incremental backups, is to make a completely new backup from scratch.

Also, because I will be compressing the backups, they will hopefully fit on 1 DVD instead of 2 like they do now.

I’ll keep both my readers posted on my progress.

UPDATE: here’s what I came up with

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