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You should be able to find a procedure on how to setup an automated backup of your Mac with rsync to an external disk. I am guessing rsync is already on your Mac or available directly from Apple already in Apple package format. I know Mac users who use it and I think they had it by default. I use it to backup my Linux systems but you can do the same thing on a Mac running OS X.
There are all sorts of ways to use rsync so you will have to spend a little time to understand it so that you can decide how you want to use it and to ensure you don't "backup" in the wrong direction and nuke your source instead of copying to your target. The syntax can take a little to get figured out but if you take some time you'll be alright. The most appropriate usage in this case is probably just to keep a single copy of your main disk mirrored on the backup disk. Setup correctly it will only copy things that have changed and not all of the files each time so it is plenty fast and you can use a cheap external drive and don't have to worry about the type of connection. You can backup the whole disk or just key directories and files since you already should have a copy of the O/S.
Personally I just backup key configuration directories (e.g., /etc), custom configuration files in other places, and my personal stuff. I also exclude history files, thumbnail files, browswer caches and the like from these locations since I don't ever really need those back again if I loose them. In addition, to the daily "snapshot" from this I maintain a daily rolling "snapshot" over one week that in turn gets spit off into a weekly "snapshot" (kept for ~6 weeks I think) and from the weekly into a monthly "snapshot" (keep for ~12 months). Thanks to the magic of hard links and some smoke and mirrors the disk space required for all of this history is just the size of current files on the system (that are being backedup) + the size of any ealier files that have since changed or been deleted. So I have an extensive history for a realtively small amount of disk space. However, since this rolling snapshot approach complicates things I'd definately start with just a straight sync and stick with that initially. I assume that is all your really looking for in a backup at the moment.
Here is a Mac example I just goggled. I have not read this and have no idea if appropriate but if anyone is interested have a look and also goggle mac +rsync or the like for more examples.
http://www.labf.org/~egon/mac_backup/
posted by 216.165.146...
, Mon, 28 Nov 2005 14:50:13
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