Agreed
 

I think if Apple is not going to drop sparse bundles then they should drop wireless. Have the TMs and Time Capsule local. Then it is at least good, except for the rolling over the data thing but at least the data integrity is there.

I'm at a loss as to what "rsnapshot" is..

a

rsnapshot is a rock solid UNIX utility for filesystem snapshots & for making backups of local and remote systems.
http://www.rsnapshot.org

I have used this on Linux/UNIX based system for years, it is excellent.

I am pretty sure this is what Apple has used for the backend of TM and no doubt extra tinkering.

I'm fairly certain that TM is not using rsync or rsnapshot as a backend.

For one, they use the Spotlight index to keep track of which files need to be added to the backup (really, which directories need to be scanned for changes), while rsync always scans everything.

Two, rsync will copy only changed blocks, while TimeMachine always sends a full copy of the file.

Three, rsnapshot has an entirely different method for maintaining backup intervals. Rsnapshot explicitly names things as hourly.0, hourly.1, daily.3, weekly.4, and then renames the backups as they need to be rotated. TimeMachine only uses the date of the backup for the name, deletes expired backups, and never does any renaming.

Finally, rsync has always been GPL licensed and newer versions are GPL v3. At the least, the source would have to be available if backupd (the TimeMachine process) was based on rsync or rsnapshot and for later versions it would explicitly be disallowed from being part of the OS. As far as I'm aware, the TimeMachine source code has not been released.

TimeMachine is 100% Apple.

That said, rsync and rsnapshot are solid tools that I use every day. I even exclude my email backup folder from TimeMachine and use rsync (and zfs snapshots, previously rsnapshot) to maintain a backup history.

thx my learned Friend ;-)......Was a stab in the dark

I love ZFS too ;-) Most of my storage is going that way next year (RAID-Z2)

fracai;

I can't tell whether a guy like me would benefit from having rsync/rsnapshot on my macs...you know far more about this subject than I do and I get the feeling that rsync and rsnapshot are solid tools for those who really know their beans about backing up, the underlying system ramifications and needs, etc.

Or, is that an unfair interpretation; can they work for a guy like me...basically an artist who wants to back up his data, uses TM and wants a little extra insurance?

Thank you!

a

I think for most carbon copy cloner and super coupled with an offsite program like crashplan is the best way to go. TM is there to be a built in solution. Back ups and strategies are not a simple tooic and TM makes it simple. I would only say that TM should never be done with anything but local attached storage be uase ofnsoarse bundles. Non local shoould have used file level. And of course apple should finally update their file system.

For extra insurance I'd look at backing up to a different location, preferably offsite.

Right now, I back up the majority of my machines with TimeMachine (to a FreeNAS hosted share, maybe I've been lucky, but I've not had many problems at all with TimeMachine and networkshares [1]). In the past I then backed up a few directories using rsnapshot / rsync when TimeMachine got bogged down by large numbers of files. Now those directories are managed directly on the NAS so I'm not using rsync for anything but on demand file transfer. I also backup my machines to Crashplan for offsite protection.

So, rsync and rsnapshot are very appropriate tools if you have a need for them. In my opinion though, TimeMachine is way easier to setup and for most users rsync won't be necessary. Also, as anthlover suggested, CCC and SuperDuper are likely to be way easier to configure than dealing with rsync or rsnapshot.

[1] Backing up with TimeMachine to FreeNAS has actually been a really good match. First, I'm seeing fewer problems than I did when my TimeMachine backups were on a Drobo. Second, when I've had a backup go bad (once in the past six months), I rolled back the TimeMachine image to a good version (thank you ZFS snapshots) and started backing up again. In the past I'd need to wipe away the backup history and start from scratch. Now I lose just the bad backup and the downtime until it's fixed. I'm also fairly certain that the corruption was due to shutting my laptop while the backup was running. That doesn't always cause problems, but it's not rare.

Remind me not to type responses from my Cell Phone. :)

Should I not have sent that ambulance?

acme - I had very similar issues with TM when I first bought my Mac. My 1TB TM drive would have 600GB free, and the TM run would fail saying that it didn't have enough space. At the outset, TM thought that there was plenty of space (it thought it only had to back up 30GB). But as the backup progressed, the estimate for how much data had to be written kept growing. I spoke to Apple support several times about this, and what we finally discovered was that this problem was being caused by the fact that I was running a virtual machine actively (it was running, not shot down) at the time of the backup. For some reason, TM couldn't initially determine the size of the virtual disk, but later on it did make that determination. But it was too late, because it had already passed the delete step of the process.

My solution was to exclude all virtual machine files from the TM backup. I also run CCC monthly, and they get backed up then. I also backup key data from the virtual machines as needed.

Once I excluded the vm's, TM has been rock solid ever since.

I don't know if you might be running vm's, but perhaps this info may spur your thought process as to what might be happening.

Time machine absolutely should not be used for VM backup or for that matter things like Entourage database. This is where TM falls over.....it does my not handle big data files very well and 1 little change will lead to a completely new copy of file. Totally inefficient. This is why I use CrashPlan.

Nor do I...I do not believe I am, but how would I determine whether or not?

thank you!

a

Acme if you do not know you are running VMs - Virtual Machines then you definitely are not !
ie. using with VMware, Virtialbox, parallels etc. to run other OS such as Windows and Linux.

well good to know, thank you/

In other news, I gave rsync a twirl...it seemed to work fine, except for a pile of
"skipping" various files. I guess I'll need to learn all the commands to include when running it. seems like a worthy tool.

a

Generally the most basic command and command i use most is

Note using sudo as system level files will be skipped if backing up as a User.
Note training slash means copy content into target

ah...that explains that..thank you for sharing commands you use with it.

a

Are there any security risks doing rsynch while sudo is active?

a

No using sudo gives you full access rights to all files/folders. I tend to use rsync for User folder backups or clones of certain folders to network disks etc.

Overall for full disk clones and automation Carbon copy cloner is an amazing reliable tool.