Monday, March 29, 2010

Better than Time Machine for Mac?

Time Machine is a great tool to backup data from your mac. For those of you who are not aware though, there are some alternatives to Time Machine. Using rsync, you can create a simple script that takes your music, pictures etc. and copies it to any drive of your choosing. You could have the script copy your files to multiple drives, instead of just one.

Open up a text editor and create the following script (replacing the paths with your computer's paths)
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#!/bin/bash

rsync -a --progress ~/Documents/ /Volumes/BackUpUSBDrive/Documents
rsync -a --progress ~/Music/ /Volumes/BackupUSBDrive/Music
rsync -a --progress ~/Pictures/ /Volumes/BackupUSBDrive/Pictures
rsync -a --progress ~/Movies/ /Volumes/BackupUSBDrive/Movies
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save the file as Backup.bash and then right click on the file and change the file to always open with Terminal. This will allow you to simply click on the file and it will execute your backup script.

NOTE: If you have Parallels installed and you do not want to backup all the virtual hard drives to your USB Backup drive, you can use the --exclude command

For example: rsync -a --progress --exclude Parallels/ ~/Documents/ /Volumes/BackUpUSBDrive/Documents

It is also very important that you have the slash at the end of the "Source" path and that you do not have a slash after the "Destination" path.

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