Comments on: Backup Bliss with OS X

By: Ian

Ian — Wed, 23 May 2007 23:54:45 +0000

Oh, I forgot to add one thing: For many different hosting services (such as Dreamhost) you need to set restrictive permissions on the directory you’ll be backing up files to:

chmod 700 ~/Backup

.. works fine. ALSO: if you want to use the -E command to backup Applications, then the structure would be something like:

rsync -aE ~/Projects username@hostname.dreamhost.com:~/Backup/

-Ian.

By: Rick Thomas

Rick Thomas — Mon, 07 May 2007 19:15:37 +0000

Please note that this approach will lose mac resource forks and other file metadata. For example, a *.webloc file will be corrupted.

Apple *partially* fixed the problem and patched rsync in 10.4 to add the -E option, but the rsync server must be running the same patch.

This will show you which files have resource forks:
find . -type f -exec test -s {}/..namedfork/rsrc \; -print

By: Ivan Kedrin

Ivan Kedrin — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 19:29:02 +0000

rsync’s awesome! Mozy’s pretty good too if you are willing to pay for backups or simply have a need for an enterprise level solution.

p.s. Ian can you reply to my email?

By: Ian

Ian — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 18:29:04 +0000

In a strange coincidence, Om wrote about a bunch of more tightly-integrated solutions today. I am not a big fan of using WebDAV and manually mounting the remote host as a local drive, however. Doesn't work in practise. This method is ultra-cheap and 100% reliable, as long as you have your computer on when it's time for the script to run.