Excuse my ignorance, particularly of relevant posts, but I have a unix question of some interest to me. It's about making small backups cheaply and conveniently off a notebook.
My son uses a G3 dual-USB iBook for current schoolwork. He'd like to be able to do nightly backups of a single folder -- say, a couple of MB or so.
Now, there are a couple of obvious solutions
(1) get him an external disk and do scheduled backups with Carbon Copy Cloner
(2) buy Retrospect and do network backups to a HD on my machine
These are the $100+ solutions. Maybe there is a way to Applescript a scheduled port of a folder over to his account on my machine, but it occurs to me that a simpler, cheaper one is to do scheduled backups to a USB memory stick which he tries to leave plugged in each evening.
In principle, one just puts "cp -R ~user/currentstuff /Volumes/memstick"
in crontab. That'll do it. But if the memory stick is not inserted when this command is triggered, you end up with a simple "memstick" file that just confuses things when the real memory stick is inserted.
So what commands do I use to firstly test to see that /Volumes/memstick exists (such that the memory stick is mounted) and, if it does exist, go ahead and do the folder copy?
With the low price of memory sticks these days, that's a $10-15 solution, and it's compact and travels with his computer
voldenuit
05-01-2005, 11:12 PM
Put a file or folder on the stick, then check for its presence.
Also consider backing up to that other Mac you seem to have using Filesharing. That way you get redundant backups for next to nothing.
It's ok to just back up documents, but when the disk goes south one day, you'll have to start over installing a complete system from scratch.
styrafome
05-01-2005, 11:20 PM
There is a very large middle ground between a big gun like Retrospect and the command-line sorcery. For example you could download one of many freeware/shareware folder synchronizers. Like these. (http://macupdate.com/search.php? os=Mac+OS+X&keywords=sync+folder&button.x=0&button.y=0)
Doug Lassiter
05-02-2005, 07:04 AM
Well, the idea was to have this as a scheduled simple-document-only backup that didn't require any brain power to remember nor effort to do. (I will admit that this isn't the best way to train backup-consciousness, but ...)
As to rebuilding the disk in case of a major failure - no big deal as we do a CCC backup via target mode every few months. It's the "Aaack, that report I was working on for the last few days is due tomorrow and now I can't get to it!!" that I want to avoid.
The synchronizers look promising. I still want to do this as a scheduled task, but maybe one of these can handle it. Thanks!
guardian34
05-02-2005, 11:12 AM
But if the memory stick is not inserted when this command is triggered, you end up with a simple "memstick" file
After changing the BACKUP and CURRENT variables, save this code as a file, and have cron run the file.
#!/bin/bash
BACKUP="/Volumes/memstick"
CURRENT="$HOME/Documents/currentstuff"
if [ -d "$BACKUP" ]; then
cp -R "$CURRENT" "$BACKUP"
fi
styrafome
05-02-2005, 12:05 PM
I use FoldersSynchronizer which is on the linked list and it does come with a timer. I don't think it's the only one with a timer, either. It should be possible for you to find a relatively inexpensive GUI solution that can be scheduled. Or, as others are suggesting, you can always hook up a free command line solution to free schedulers like cron or anacron. (Despite the fact that I hang around here, I'm not into the command line.)
Doug Lassiter
05-02-2005, 03:10 PM
Those solutions look good. Thanks very much!
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