One Quickie

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Backups on the cheap (Unix->General)

I've been using hfstar for doing backups. I tar directory hierarchies to an external firewire drive from my TiBook (say my entire $HOME directory, plus the /Applications directory. There's probably other stuff that should be snarfed (like /Library), but I didn't on my last backup, and doing a restore from scratch seemed to work OK. Here's a quick outline of backing up to the external firewire drive called "Wikkit":

• % sudo mkdir /Volumes/Wikkit/backup
• % cd /Users
• % sudo hfstar cf - bork | (cd /Volumes/Wikkit/backup; sudo hfstar xf -)

The tar above is the standard push-pull tar. Both sides are run as root so that owner, group, and permissions are preserved for the files.

To Restore:

• % cd /Users
• % sudo mv bork bork-orig
• % cd /Volumes/Wikkit/backup
• % sudo hfstar cf - bork | (cd /Users; sudo hfstar xf -)

Some folks have had success with psync, but we haven't used it yet.