Backup Solutions For Your Mac or CustoMac

[jdizzle]

Article: Backup Solutions For Your Mac or CustoMac

I use Time Machine, but for cloning my Hackintosh drive, I've been using Chronosync (which I use for other stuff as well).

Chronosync is awesome

 

[witchbutter]

I'm super data paranoid, so I combine MacZFS with daily RSYNCs to a FreeNAS system as well as time machine backups of the system volume to the same FreeNAS system that also presents a time machine disk.

I also keep my super critical music data in Dropbox so that copies are always syncing to cloud storage.

I've always had problems with HFS+ randomly corrupting files or losing resource forks since I started using OSX 10.2. It's gotten more rare in progressive OSX versions, but I'm still really paranoid about it. Nothing is worse than finding corrupt files and going to your backups to find that your backup versions are all corrupted also. This is why I make heavy use of ZFS.

 

[cammorin]

The best by far and the most comfortable is Déjà Vu to mac. That makes perfect copies scheduled incremental or mirror mode and fully bootable.

Super fast amazing and wonderful backup software and verified that I use for 5 years.

http://propagandaprod.com - Déjà Vu - Single User License $29 USD

Sorry for my in English

 

[jamesf3]

Article: Backup Solutions For Your Mac or CustoMac

Is there any reason or advantage to have an external hard drive as a time machine backup for clients?
I'm running ML server and have an extra internal hard drive I was going to use for clients.

Solely for portability to the various clients.

 

[Rx4Mac]

Article: Backup Solutions For Your Mac or CustoMac

I used both SD and CCC never need to install the bootloader after backup. its there and backup drive boots. CCC seems to be faster

This could only have worked if the 'boot' drive specified in the BIOS already has the boot loader installed. For a REAL test to see if a drive is a complete clone you need to remove/disconnect all other HD's from the system ( i.e. only have the cloned backup connected ), set BIOS as needed for that drive to boot, and attempt a boot.

Just selecting a CCC/SD'd drive from the boot loader DOES NOT mean that that particular drive will boot on its own.

CCC and SuperDuper! will copy the 'boot' file from the root level of the drive, but they cannot and will not copy boot0 ( or boot0md ) to the drives MBR, or boot1h to the partition's boot sector.

To get those files duplicated on a clone-drive, it is easiest to use the Chimera boot loader installer.

( dd could be used from terminal for a complete clone... but there are many caveats... )

Rx4Mac

 

[maclover]

Article: Backup Solutions For Your Mac or CustoMac

I'm super data paranoid, so I combine MacZFS with daily RSYNCs to a FreeNAS system as well as time machine backups of the system volume to the same FreeNAS system that also presents a time machine disk.

Please can you give me the direction to make a solution like you did?

I own a HP MicroServer with RAID-1 installed. I may switch to FREENAS from WHS v1 (used for TM-Backups). WHS share used wit sparsebundle but TM sometimes went broken.
My iMac (mid 2011) will stay with 10.6.8. The other Macs and Hacks are upgraded to Lion and ML.

 

[SiliconVoid]

I have Time Machine enabled to keep track of my data (default settings).
As far as a backup of the boot drive (accessible without having to reinstall the OS) I simply use Disk Utility.
You can boot to your OS dvd, or UniBeast stick, open Disk Utility and select your boot drive, select Restore, and drag any drive large enough to hold the physical data (not the whole drive size) into the target box, and select Restore.
Restoring from that back is the same procedure except selecting your backup as the source and your boot drive as the target.
I run that weekly, overwriting the previous back up as it is no longer needed.
The backup drive is an old 90gb 2.5" drive I pulled out of a USB case, taped to the bottom of a drive bay inside of my case heh..

 

[davidr418]

One major weakness of Time Machine is that it only backs up at the file level. I run Parallels and virtual Win 7/Win XP machines on my Hackintosh (odd, yes, but it works for me), and Time Machine backs up the 24GB VM files every hour if I'm using them.

I've since started using QRecall (http://qrecall.com). It's much more configurable and versatile than Time Machine, but the real win is that it backs up only the parts of a file that have changed, which makes the backups vastly more space efficient. You can control the granularity of the "quanta" that it divides files into, trading off space for speed or vice versa.

When you restore a file, it pulls the disparate pieces together from the various backups to reassemble the file as it was when it was backed up. Like Time Machine, you can keep an arbitrary number of "versions" of a file going back into time.

That said, there are some drawbacks:

1. Time Machine backs up every hour. You could configure QRecall to do this, but probably don't want to. Daily backups work best for me.
2. It's not as woven into the structure of the file system as Time Machine is. Thus, you can't (for example) easily restore individual deleted messages in OS X Mail.
3. Restoring an entire disk requires reinstalling OS X, downloading and installing QRecall, then restoring from the backup (it can restore everything to your current boot volume, which is nice). With Time Machine, you can restore directly from the recovery partition or boot CD.

All that said, I'm still really liking QRecall. Time Machine over the years has worked well, but occasionally has plagued me with its lack of status reports and the "Time Machine Encountered an Error" messages. QRecall builds in lots of data checks and can run verification passes to validate your archive at defined intervals.

Definitely worth a look...

 

[Koalaman]

Article: Backup Solutions For Your Mac or CustoMac

What's with the avatar? EelHead has it too...

 

[eelhead]

Article: Backup Solutions For Your Mac or CustoMac

What's with the avatar? EelHead has it too...

I don't have his avatar.
I have my own