LaCie SilverKeeper

Gen, I used the latest version of CCC over the weekend to clone my PB's drive (running latest Tiger) to an external HD. No probs. Was able to boot from the external and run defragging software just fine.

I use SilverKeeper for backups. It is not strictly speaking a substitute for CCC. CCC is used to make a bit-for-bit exact backup copy of a system drive, whereas SilverKeeper is an incremental backup utility to backup specific folders, with exception lists. As it is incremental, it is quite fast (only copies files that have changed), but it cannot be used to restore your boot drive to bootable status.

It works as advertised, and the price is right. The only flaw is that a backup set is a single folder and all its subfolders. You can't make a backup set for Pictures + Music, you would have to create two backup sets, or a backup set of your home dir and explicitly exclude all folders other than Pictures or Music.

Gen, I used CCC again last week end to back up my powerbook's 2 partitions. my hard drive has a Panther boot partition, on which I use CCC to clone my Tiger partitions from my powerbook. CCC also does incremental backup, also with exception lists.

Get a mac mini and attach your external firewire drive to it. Then use rsyncx (http://archive.macosxlabs.org/rsyncx/rsyncx.html) to setup an rsync job that will backup your drive incrementaly each night. You dont need a monitor for the mini as you can use VNC to remote desktop into the box as needed.

I tried a bunch of other utilities but they all required manual intervention or manipulation of a GUI to work (or conflicted with other application alert boxes), which for me was a non-starter as I wanted this stuff to "just work" silently in the background at 4am each night.

I've got rsync backing up 2 powerbooks and emailing me a log of what it did after it finishes, that way i know if the job failed or not. happy to share my shell script if needed.

I use rsync to back up my $HOME directory to one firewire volume, but I use Super Duper to maintain a bootable mirror on another firewire drive. Super Duper has some very clever options, such as clone sets, that I'm too mobile to make use of. (i.e., I'm not always connected to the external drives.)

It has the aforementioned "gui" to deal with, but it comes with an applescript .app file you can automate with launchd/cron/whatever, which is what I've done.

Gen, I use SuperDuper. If you have an external FireWire drive as big or bigger than your internal, it will synchronise quickly so they match, and has a nice one-click UI for it.
This is not a longitudinal backup, but a current state backup, but it gives you a complete clone of the drive so if your disc dies you can boot from this instead and continue, or if the machine dies you can boot another from it and carry on.

This has saved my home machine a couple of times.

I wanted info on Silverkeeper, and I want to thank everyone who contributed to this thread!

I learned a lot and more on what is out there to backup my LaCie d2. (for example, that "incremental backup" doesn't mean you have a bootable backup!!!).

I'm a musician and decided recently (after my d2 gave signs of misfunction) to make a complete backup of my d2 on another LaCie (Porsche).
Right now, I do it entirely manually, just replacing folders every time I worked on a project. Probably the safest way... but terribly tedious!

Thanks again to everyone for the input!

fedtho

A quick way to "automate" the file backup from one drive to another would be to use the following command line (this example would copy EVERYTHING from the "C" drive to the "D" drive - assuming your d2 is the "D"): xcopy /c /h /e /v /y /i c:\*.* d:

Is Silverkeeper okay for Intel based Macbook Pro if I want make Backups of a Win partition (10%) as well as of a Mac partition (90%)? Should I use FAT32 and MSDOS fileformat or better Mac extended? Thanks a lot. It should mainly be relieable for my Mac files!!

meini

I use Silverkeeper 1.1.4 on OSX 10.4.7 running on both PPC and Intel Macs. It's not a universal binary, but that doesn't seem to affect this application as much as, say, Entourage. I'm happy with the performance.

Silverkeeper does backup, restore, and synchronization, and can create a bootable backup.

You can create complex silverkeeper backups. The key is using multiple sets, and exclusions, and then telling SK to "backup all." That runs all the defined backup sets.

But hey! It's free, so why not simply try it for yourself?

Best Regards,
Dadr

I installed Silverkeeper and tried to create a bootable external drive for my OS 10.2.8 Powerbook. Silverkeeper crashed part way through the backup process and when the dust cleared, 5 GB of data were missing from my internal drive, including all of the contents of my Applications folder (except Silverkeeper)! If anyone has any suggestions about what happened, or more importantly, how to get my data and applications back, please let me know.
Be very careful with Silverkeeper!