Backup Solution for my Mac

[garethEds]

Evening Everyone,

 

I'm looking for a backup solution for my Mac and wondered if anyone could offer any advice. The information I have at the moment is:

 

Retrospect - sometimes has problems restoring from backups

 

TimeMachine - doesn't work with my NAS box. I have a WD MyWorld NAS drive. Never been able to get TM to work with it.

 

So I want something that I can click on and it will do a full backup and then smaller ones once a week. It must also work with my NAS solution.

 

Any advice is welcome,

 

Gareth

[pooley]

Not tried it myself but (taken from another forum)

There seems to be two ways to do it. The thread I linked above has the first way, which I haven't tried.

 

Some folks have had luck with this command if your disk is attached to an AEBS:

Code:

 

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

 

 

The second way is more intricate, but works.

 

Mount your NAS Share using AFP, have the mount be a temporary name.

 

You need either to have an external drive formatted as HFS or you need to create a very small partition on your internal drive and call it something like MPBackup.

 

Start Time Machine and choose this small disk partition.

Stop the Time Machine from doing any backup.

Time machine should have created two files with a "." notation (meaning its hidden from finder and terminal "ls" commands.

 

Go into the terminal application and type

 

cd /Volumes

ls

 

This will give you all the mounted disks including your share volume from the NAS. You should see MPBackup (or whatever name you used) and the temp name that you chose for your NAS drive.

 

Type in

cd /Volumes/MPBackup

ls -a

 

You should see two files starting with a "."

 

You need to copy these two files to the NAS share. You can do that by typing

 

cp -p /Volumes/MPBackup/.* /Volumes/

 

You then need to type in:

 

umount /Volumes/MPBackup

 

This will unmount (eject) your MPBackup partition.

 

You then need to rename the NAS Share MPBackup and re-mount it.

 

At this point, restart Time Machine and it should see the disk.

 

Make sure you have sleep set to never (system preferences->energy saver) so the machine doesn't go to sleep during a backup.

 

After the first backup is completed, when you eject the NAS Share or your shutdown your machine, Time Machine won't see it again until you re-mount the drive correctly.

 

Time machine creates a file called .sparsebundle or something to that effect.

 

If you double click that file in the finder, it will mount the drive and you will see a disk show up on your desktop.

 

Start Time Machine and it will then see the disk and start doing the incremental backups...

 

I'm writing this from memory, since they don't have Macs here at work. The steps are there, as you can see, its not straight forward. The file names change, so I can't give you specifics, but the above should work. I'll try and answer any questions you might have about it.

 

I have this working on my ReadyNAS NV+ and I did a 300GB backup over Wireless G. It took about 3 days to complete the initial backup. I came home and mounted the Drive like I did above and it did the incremental backup. Next stop is to try and restore something just to make sure it works.

 

Good Luck!

[Arthur]

For Time Machine, the method detailed here seems to be the one which most people have success with.

 

Failing that, I would look at Carbon Copy Cloner or Synk if you need to do bootable system backups, or BackupList+ if you only need to backup specific folders.

Edited October 31, 2010 by Arthur
Forgot about CCC

[Soulfish]

Personally I'm a big fan of Backblaze. It's an online backup service that costs $5/month for unlimited space. Having used it for a couple of years now it's a great service that just sits there in the background uploading everything to the "cloud". Saved by bacon a couple of times as well . I know they have a Mac client as well so I thought I'd make the suggestion. Not quite what you were after, but for around £40 a year its great peace of mind and its great if you ever need to get hold of something stored on your PC since you can login and get the file "restored" ready for you to download . Only downside is the time it takes to get everything uploaded. Took me around 4 months of 24/7 uploading, but now its done it's just any differences that are uploaded

[Carter]

Have a look at these solutions:

 

LaCie - Intego Backup Assistant

Lacie SilverKeeper

Get Backup

iBackup

 

Personally before I had two HD's in my server setup as RAID I was using Lacie Silver Keeper. It's very simplistic and I was using it's sync option. it would run a a certain tim in the AM to sync with another drive with all the files I wanted.

 



[teejay]

You could use rsync - HOWTO Backup Your Mac With rsync

[Arthur]

You could use rsync

...or even arRsync. It's got a really cool icon too.