Need a backup tool that WON'T delete

owen-b · #1 July 31st, 2005, 10:03 AM

Hi all,

I need a backup program that will:

1 - backup my iBook to a partition on my Lacie 160gig, that will work as a bootable drive. I don't mind if it deletes everything and starts over the first time but I'd prefer not to have to go through that wait EVERYtime subsequently.

2 - (and MOST importantly) allow me to backup NEW and ALTERED photographs from my photo archives on the iBook to the other partition on the Lacie, WITHOUT deleting on the Destination anything I've deleted for storage space reasons on the Source. In other words, it needs to look through all my archives on the iBook, spot what's new or altered, and ADD them to the related archives on the Destination.

I have Silverkeeper and it claims to do (1) but doesn't seem to do (2).

Cheers folks!

Owen

michaelsanford · #2 July 31st, 2005, 01:54 PM

Depending on how comfortable you are in the terminal, look into 'rsync', it does exactly what you're thinking of (you can configure it to 'diff' sets of files and back up only changed ones).

owen-b · #3 July 31st, 2005, 06:34 PM

Hmmm, terminal... Will I need to start learning a whole new bunch of code (only just got my head round the absolute basics of CSS!

Owen

Tarz · #4 August 4th, 2005, 04:12 PM

Actually, I wouldn't think you'd need to learn much at all, really. In fact, if you want to keep it simple, just download and install RsyncX (a Google search will take you to it). There's a GUI tool in RsyncX that will mirror one drive/folder/etc. to another.

RsyncX will have to backup everything the first time you run it, but after that will only do the changes, so it will go pretty quickly the second and subsequent times, unless you're changing lots of huge files every day (e.g., hour-long digital video files).

See:
http://archive.macosxlabs.org/rsyncx/rsyncx.html

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macos...es/rsyncx.html