How can I make scheduled backups of an external drive on to another external drive?

[idyll]

I want to schedule a daily backup of one external hard drive on to another external drive. The app "Carbon Copy Cloner" looks like it does what I need with their "Incremental Backup" feature and scheduling. Are there any other alternatives, possibly free ones?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

CarbonCopyCloner (version 3.4.7 is still free and available for download here and works with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion), the free version, does what you need. SuperDuper! is the other alternative, but it is still not free.

 

[Dave Braine]

Time Machine wil do it.

 

[bakechad]

Rsync in a cronjob

Something like this:

rsync -av --delete /path_of_source_drive_root_directory/ /path_of_second_drive/

type 'man rsync' for entire syntax

'man crontab' for crontab syntax

 

[Brian33]

Yeah, I use rsync for that too, in a simple script that launchd starts for me daily. (launchd / launchctl is the preferred method over cron, according to the launchd man page.) Works great and it's free!

It's not hard, however I can understand that not everyone wants to piddle around looking up arcane options on a man page...

 

[blue-fireball]

Another vote for SuperDuper!

 

[fhall1]

Chronosync will also do it, but it's pricey IMO