Getting your Mac to work with BackupPC on Unix

Perhaps days, depending on your backup data set size, network speed, disk speed, and phase of the moon. Okay, maybe not the last part, but you never know.

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And in the meantime, your backup system is gone. At this point, it is obvious that having data in at least three places is necessary. Note that there are techniques for repairing the Time Machine backup volume. Dig out the solder and oscilloscope first, though. That is completely unacceptable for a backup system. But that is beside the point.

Any backup strategy that can fail and irrecoverably take all your data to Valhalla is a horrible strategy. I need something that cannot fail. As it turns out, I have never really cared about the save-old-versions-of-files feature of Time Machine. I have used it to recover entire volumes — twice, both during machine upgrades.

Recovering an inadvertently deleted file is rather rare for me, but I suppose I do care about that feature a little bit. Time Machine sparsebundle files are opaque to the average user.

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You cannot open them up, peek inside, and grab the files you need. You need the Time Machine client, and when it encounters an error with the backup file, it offers no choice but to abort and start over. This is why I use rsync. With a little bit of Time Machine still involved for added spice. You know, just to keep things interesting. In its simplest form, it just copies files from one place to another. Which is how I use it. The end result of an rsync backup is a mirror of your source data.

Readable by anything that can read the format of the target filesystem. This part is critical. Backups are irrelevant if nothing can recover them. A bunch of files in a directory on a disk is accessible by just about everything. Time Machine sparsebundles require Time Machine, on a Mac. Files in a directory can be read by any app or OS. Thisincreases your odds of recovery by, well, a lot. I have a few computers around the house. Our primary family computer is an iMac, and has one internal disk and two USB external disks.

The internal disk has all the user folders, documents, applications, and OS files. The external drives contain photos, movies, music, etc.

GitHub - rsyncOSX/RsyncOSX: A macOS GUI for rsync

The username stuff allows me to log in to the server and perform the backup using that identity on the server. Rsync can fail with network or disk hardware errors. Time Machine can fail with network, disk hardware, or buggy software errors. I prefer rsync for the really important stuff, and use Time Machine for the OS disk, which is relatively small and something I can recover from quickly after the inevitable Time Machine error.

Superb advice. One caveat, though. I downloaded and built rsync version 3. Of course, 2. Could you please give me some advice? I am backing up from Snow Leopard with rsync 2.

Time Machine sucks, use rsync instead

At the moment I just use rsync -av and I get quite many permission errors, it seams to back up just right thought. I be installing 3. However, permission errors may be able to be addressed by using sudo. Try sudo rsync -av. This is bad on a number of levels. It will also correspondingly bang the crap out of your network. Using this option should keep your back-up process rsync from slowing down your machine. Thanks for the great post! I had similar problems with Time Machine and I am also a big fan of rsync. My backup solution is now mainly based on rsync though I am still running Time Machine.

Hi Brian, Many thanks for the information you provided. In your example you excluded an bunch of files — I copied what you did and my rsync is now working. This second post is to give a bit more detail in order to help others that have had same problem that I did.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard: Restoring from a Time Machine Backup

I have a private folder the my wife and I share and I wanted to put it into an encrypted sparse image file. That rsync completed fine. I then wanted to be able to use rsync to synchronize the private folder on my hard drive with another encrypted sparse image file on a network drive.


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This second copy always failed regardless of destination folder type. But this is in addition to a Time Machine backup on an external drive directly connected to my machine, as it gives me the change history and pretty GUI to enjoy. It requires some extra processing to ensure that all the files returned are valid spotlight sometimes returns weird extra results , but it reduce to the initial checking time to a fraction of what it currently is.

Only copies necessary files, already backuped-and-not-modified files are not copied. Useful to save time!! I use it if backup to an external drive with a different filesystem useful for networks too -h human readable output, together with -i itemize changes, together with -P —partial —progress. This may due to the fact, that bsdtar converts any files with extended attributes into AppleDouble format, which stores the attributes in separate files with a defined name format. Variant 4: tar GNU tar 1.

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The grandfather of unix archives failed on far too many tests in Backup-Bouncer. At least I found no settings that conserved or converted the extended attributes.


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  • Ok, back to BackupPC: Basically, only variant 3 remains feasible for backup purposes. Files were backed up, but the XferLOG always complained about a failed backup. The output of BSD tar is slightly different to that of GNU tar, which resulted in some regex matching to fail and thus not reporting any backed up files. After applying the following tiny modification, BackupPC was happily storing my Mac OS files with all extended attributes. Einstein's Chronicles Yet another helpful blog. Comments 0 Trackbacks 0 Leave a comment Trackback.

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