GoneMac

Remote Synchronization, aka rsync, is a very handy tool for setting up automated backups for your Mac.

First this is not designed as a definitive guide. But I hope, it is enough to get you going if you need a good way to automate your backups.

I use it to backup this website, among many others, to a local machine, then I have that machine backed up to an offsite service. It is available for Unix, Linux, Mac, and PC. It is native on all but the PC. In order to use it on a PC you will need to follow the instructions at the following website, PC setup instructions. Below are the basic steps to get this up and running on a Mac, Linux, or UNIX system. Once up and running you can backup between any two systems, Mac, Linux, Unix, or PC, at this point it becomes platform independent.

1. Obtain a external drive, Firewire is best but USB will do. Configure it as /Volumes/backup . There is a great writeup on Dave’s Logbook on how to do this.
2. Setup SSH Instructions here
3. Then to backup your home directory from a terminal window execute the following command
   1. rsync -aE –delete ~ “/Volumes/backup/”
      1. parameter a = archive mode
      2. E = copy extended resources
      3. –delete = remove any files on the receiving site , files that have been removed since the last sync
4. Put the rsync command above in a cron or create an Automator script and run it from iCal. I’ll cover cron and iCal launching in a future article, but until then you can google “Mac cron” or “iCal launch Automator” and find all the info you need to setup and run the command from cron.

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written by Blake