Comments on: Mac Tips: Backup (Part 2)

By: Brett

Brett — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:30:33 +0000

For the more geek-ily inclined, use rsync. It’s free, and fun! Grab an external drive >= your computer’s drive and:
sudo rsync -vaxE –delete –ignore-errors / /Volumes/Backup/

This will give you a complete bootable backup of your mac.

By: Jason Vallery

Jason Vallery — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 07:05:06 +0000

Another option is to backup to Amazon S3. I wrote a simple step-by-step guide to do this.

I guess I can’t share the link with you! If you go to my website (vallery.net) it is the most recent post.

By: Higgins

Higgins — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 23:48:53 +0000

#5 – Yeah, the Time Machine backups aren’t (and perhaps never will be?) bootable. And I agree about the links. :)

By: Scott

Scott — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:28:23 +0000

Me, I am waiting for Google’s GDRIVE or PLATYPUS or whatever the heck they will be calling it. I’d rather use an online backup. I am a MAC person and have yet to switch my macs to Leopard as I heard people have had problems with documents that get lost in the translation (so to speak.)

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 21:13:43 +0000

Links in comments are kosher, just leave off the “h t m l : / /” part (start with the w w w). That auto-creates the link, but shows the whole thing. Like http://www.mentalfloss.com

By: Michael Higgins

Michael Higgins — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 17:21:37 +0000

So, I’ve been too busy/chicken to make the Leopard jump yet. Is it still true that the Time Machine backup is not bootable?

My personal scheme is that everything important (for work, etc.) goes in SVM and periodically I make a bootable clone of my drive to a FireWire disk using SuperDuper.

By the way, I know it’s anti-spam, but the whole no-links-in-comments thing is totally fascist dude.

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 12:16:39 +0000

Wow; I had no idea the Time Capsule also had an AirPort Base Station built in. I thought it was just an Apple-fied firewire drive.

That’ll teach me to make assumptions based on listening to part of the keynote and glancing at the Apple Store shelves.

By: Higgins

Higgins — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 22:42:57 +0000

Dave – you can do Time Machine backups to a mounted network drive *if* it’s being shared using Apple File Sharing (in other words, by another Mac or Mac OS X Server…not by a regular Airport Extreme which uses Windows-style sharing, or a Windows server). In the office here we have an OS X Server which appears as a Time Machine source for clients connecting to it — I think you can do similar things without the server software though.

Or you could just buy Time Capsule. :)

By: Witera33it

Witera33it — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 22:33:28 +0000

Doing backups over a network is what time capsule is for. Also, according to my tech, getting a tera that is stable(you know, like a server grade hard drive like the time capsule) you’re not going to be getting one much cheaper. The time capsule is exactly what I’m looking for.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 21:54:11 +0000

The Time Capsule is a neat idea, but like most Apple peripherals, terribly overpriced. A good alternative is to buy a bare drive and a cheap Firewire or USB 2.0 enclosure from a PC shop, and end up saving a bunch of cash. It may not have the Apple cool-factor, but if aesthetics are important to you it can be tucked away behind your desk.

Also, if it’s going to be kept in use constantly, find an enclosure with decent cooling to keep the drive from overheating

A while back I found a neat gadget at Other World Computing (www.macsales.com) that allows you to hook up a bare drive (desktop or notebook drive) to a USB port without an enclosure. I use it mostly for emergency support, but with a little work it could be used as a permanent solution. With that (or something similar), you could build your own enclosure using anything from a gutted book to an old camera case, or just have the bare drive sitting on your desk.

Too bad Time Machine can’t do backups over a network… Or can it?