[OS X TeX] OT: Backup software

[Gary L. Gray]

On Oct 10, 2006, at 6:36 AM, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> I'm very impressed by Gary's backup strategy: if I understood  
> correctly, incremental backups every hour to different hard drives  
> in the day and in the evening, plus a bootable clone of the whole  
> hard drive every day. Unfortunately that doesn't seem possible  
> here: first, it requires several different hard drives, which  
> moneywise isn't possible; and it requires configuring several  
> pieces of software rather precisely, which I'm not sure I can manage.


It could readily be done with one large drive that you have  
partitioned (though it would be tough to carry around if you are  
laptop user). The fact that I do it with three separate drives  
(portable, home, and office) is simply paranoia. :-)


> Another concern is size and time: my home directory is about 20 GB,  
> and making a full backup with Backup takes already about 2 hours,  
> which is why I am not able to do it as often as advisable. And even  
> doing a daily incremental backup takes most of my PowerBook's CPU  
> while the backup is being performed. That's why I'm skeptical about  
> attempting to backup more often. Not even to say cloning the entire  
> hard drive!


My home directory is 47GB and ChronoSync updates its backup in about  
5 minutes. It only looks for changes (I am pretty sure that it is  
using some version of rsync). You just have to be careful how many  
copies you archive and for how long you archive them since space can  
fill up in a hurry. I generally archive 8-12 copies and keep archived  
copies anywhere from 90-180 days and I don't have space trouble.

In addition, SuperDuper! allows incremental (I think they call them  
"smart") clones so that it only clones what has changed. Again, these  
only take about 5 minutes on a drive with 61GB of stuff.

All the best,
   Gary
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