Backups in OSX

[tongodeon]

If you have a mac, you have no excuse to not keep backups because it is cheap, fast, and incredibly easy.

1. Go to the computer store of your choice and buy an external hard drive at least as big as the one in your system.
   
2. Open /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app
   
3. Using Disk Utility, format the external hard drive HFS+ and name it "External".
   

Comments

[cactusthesaint]

That's where filesystems that support snapshots come in.

I'd really like someone to port ZFS to *.

[madbodger]

How timely. I tried going to stores but they wanted major buxx0rs for big
external firewire drives. Then I got an email from biggo internet retailer
offering oeven huger external firewire drive on the cheap. So I ordered one
and it showed up a few days ago and I backed up my first Mac! Now to do
the laptopz.

I don't know why I'm doing that obnoxious elite can't type crap, please forgive me.

[matrushkaka]

For some reason, this does not work for me.

Just got this with my rsync results:

sent 3118964629 bytes received 283280 bytes 3792398.67 bytes/sec
total size is 3090915517 speedup is 0.99
rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at /SourceCache/rsync/rsync-24/rsync/main.c(717)

The sparseimage is unchanged.

[tongodeon]

You haven't copy-and-pasted the command you're using to invoke rsync, so I am unable to speculate why it might not be happy with the instructions you're giving it.

[matrushkaka]

I used the exact command you listed in this post:

rsync -avE --delete ~ /Volumes/backup

It didn't work.

However, I discovered that this worked:

sudo rsync -avE --delete ~ /Volumes/backup

[tongodeon]

"sent 3118964629 bytes received 283280 bytes 3792398.67 bytes/sec" indicates that you were able to transfer a whole lot of files without sudo. Any idea which files it was complaining about being unable to copy? It's possible you've got a few files with bad permissions or something.

At any rate I've updated this page to add 'sudo'. The down-side is that sudo'ed commands can really b0rk your system if you're not careful.

[matrushkaka]

Nevermind. This works:

sudo rsync -avE --delete ~ /Volumes/kathryn-bkup

[saucypunk]

is the external drive bootable when you do it that way?

[tongodeon]

Not at all. You always boot from the internal drive.

Mount the firewire drive, rsync, unmount. Easy peasy. You don't need to reboot. You don't even need to log out.