Backing Up Remote Systems

June 10th, 2005

You’ve all heard the stories — my computer ate my homework, I lost the important client because my laptop died, my computer was stolen and I lost everything — you know, those stories. Well, this isn’t one of them.

Problem

I’ve been looking for the last couple weeks for a backup program or script that will allow me to:

  • backup remote folders from my server
  • can be scheduled daily, weekly, monthly
  • archives files to either a .dmg, .zip, or otherwise self-contained archive
  • doesn’t need me to manually mount remote/network drive before each backup session

What I’m not looking for is something that will clone or copy an entire drive. I just need it to be able to copy/backup specific folders from remote servers.

The Candidates

Well, there’s the usual suspects, Retrospect, Deja Vu, Impression, CarbonCopyCloner, and a few others.

Retrospect doesn’t work with Tiger yet and I’ve heard that it’s a little bloated for what I’m looking for. Deja Vu just doesn’t seem to fit the bill of what I’m looking for — I want my backups to be archive files, not CDs or DVDs. Impression doesn’t have scheduling yet, although it’s planned for version 3, and I have to manually mount each remote volume before the backup begins. CarbonCopyCloner clones drives and I’m just looking for specific folders, though I haven’t tried it yet and have no problem being proven wrong.

Help

So here I am at a standstill, asking for the help of the masses [yes, I mean all three people that visit this site] to please offer their thoughts and advice on what type of backup systems they use or have have good reviews on.

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Reader comments

  1. Gravatar

    On July 8th, 2005, Gavin Montague said:

    Have you looked at RsyncX? It’s basically a mac friendly version of Rsync. It can meet all your needs with a little bit of scripting. Just google for

  2. Gravatar

    On July 8th, 2005, Gavin Montague said:

    ..and to complete that ;-) Just google for rsync scripts if words like “bash shell” and “cron” scare you.

  3. On July 8th, 2005, Mike said:

    Thanks Gavin, I’ll be sure to check it out. So far it’s looking pretty good.

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