Do you regularly create backups of your data? Just in case the harddisk decides to die? Or anything else happens to your computer?
I sort of do. “Sort of” means that I used to run a backup only about once a month – then I started iBackup and waited for about 3-4 hours until it finished the backup to my NAS system (which I bought exactly 2 1/2 weeks before Apple announced its TimeCapsule 
). Way too long for just an incremental backup. The reason for this lengthy incremental backup is that iBackup uses SMB to connect to the NAS – which means it transfers too much data to just check if it has been changed since the last backup.
Time to create my own script – a bit of Bash scripting, rsync with an exclude file and an Automator workflow – voila, my incremental backups are now executing in about 5 minutes! Perfect for daily backups via cron and way better than the old backup “process” which took a few hours!
Here is the script: rsyncbackup.sh.txt. Feel free to adopt it as needed!
So my recommendation to everyone – review your backup process, it has to be simple, painless and fast. Otherwise you are not going to use it! Which brings up Mozy – why not using this great, unlimited online backup service? My personal reason is that I don’t want my Mac to be running to do the uploads – that’s what my NAS does in the background – and that I already own a me.com account as well as a 50GB Bingodisk account. No need for another service…
krusch · 13.09.2008 at 12:42
Incremental backups are great to protect against complete hardware failures or loss of a disk and only that.I find the incremental backup scripts which create dated snapshots with links to avoid duplicate storage of files useful for access to multiple revisions of a file (see for example rsync-incr) and combine that with an off-site backup service like mozy.com or Crashplan.
Michael Baierl · 13.09.2008 at 14:30
Yeah, and that’s exactly what happens on the NAS – it uses rsnapshot to copy all its data from its internal disk to an USB-attached disk – using hardlinks for multiple file revisions.This setup frees the client from bothering about hardlinks and even stupid Windows-Boxes can just copy their data over using SMB… it is safe and the setup has only be done once.