fwb's backup toolkit looks promising.
http://www.fwb.com/cs/btk/main.html
claims that you can incrementally mirror a disk, though it insists on
the truly awful word 'evolutive' and doesn't actually mention
preservation of symlinks.
there also appears to be a port of rsync with HFS+ support:
http://www.macosxlabs.org/rsyncx/rsyncx.html
if it wasn't a laptop, i'd be tempted to find out whether apple's
built-in RAID support lets you mirror an ATA disk and a firewire one.
there's nothing in the docs to say that you can't, and there shouldn't
be that much of a performance penalty, given apple's less than
cutting-edge IDE. but i suppose you want to be able to unplug the 'book
at some point...
best
will
ps. backing up work, fink, cvs repository manually here :(
On Thursday, July 11, 2002, at 08:45 PM, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
>
> OK, about a year ago, when I first started using OSX 10.1, I had to
> settle on using UFS for my root drive, and HFS+ for classic, because I
> found that the existing tool I was using (Retrospect) wouldn't copy
> the necessary aliases (symlinks) to my backup volume, and thus could
> not be restored. I settled on using rsync for the incremental updates
> on the UFS root volume, and Retrospect for the incremental updates on
> the HFS+ volume.
>
> Now, I've spent a year being a bit frustrated at the things that break
> (even still) when my root is UFS. So I'm strongly considering having
> my root be HFS+ on my new laptop (arrived, but not yet picked up).
> (I'll build a UFS .dmg file that I'll mount for those random net
> programs that don't understand the lame case-insensitivity of HFS+, but
> that's not relevant to the backup issue.)
>
> So, where are we now with backup solutions? Is there a tool
> (freeware, shareware, payware) that can take my root volume and
> *incrementally* update a mirror of that volume onto my external
> firewire disk, such that if my laptop disk ever dies (or I want to
> move to a new laptop :), I can take that firewire mirror and push it
> (using the same tool, I presume) to a new disk?
>
> Last year, the answer was absolutely not. Have we made any progress?
>
> Solutions involving "ditto" are ruled out, since that does a
> completely copy every time. I've got 40G to backup, but less than 1G
> of that changes daily, so I don't want to have my laptop idle for six
> hours a night just to take care of the changes. That also means that
> "Carbon Copy Cloner" is out as well (since it uses ditto underneath).
>
> My closest bet so far is to take the Perl "psync" and teach it the
> rules that the creator of Carbon Copy Cloner discovered, about
> directories that don't need to be copied, and symlinks that need to be
> added properly, to make things bootable. But that still means I'd be
> on the bleeding edge, and I can't be the first one to try to solve
> this problem. Not after a year!
>
> I want something that works like "Retrospect Duplicate", but
> understands the weird-ass links that OSX has and needs!
>
> What are the rest of you doing? Is anyone even backing anything up?
>
> --
> Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777
> 0095
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
> Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
> See PerlTraining.Stonehenge.com for onsite and open-enrollment Perl
> training!
