How to auto-backup a Time Capsule?

[RedTomato]

Hiya

I have a 1TB Time Capsule that's getting pretty old, and I don't fully trust it. It's used as a network storage drive and as a Time Machine backup repository for several mac computers.

I've bought a second 1TB USB drive to store a duplicate of the TC drive. Ideally the TC will backup itself to the USB drive every night,

I know Airport Utility has an 'archive' function that copies the TC drive to the external, but it has to be done manually.

Hence my big question: - Is there a way to make the TC automatically backup itself to the USB drive?

The TC is pretty full, and doing a duplicate seems to involve erasing the destination drive and doing a full copy, which is pretty long and hard on the TC. If the TC fails halfway through, I'll loose both sets of backups plus our file archives 🙁

Any ideas? I've seen Superduper and Rsync mentioned but I have no experience with them, and don't know if they'd work with a Time Capsule.

 

[tempusfugit]

I haven't done this or tried, but you might want to.

Use the application "Automator" in OS X to create a visual chron job.

You can probably have it automatically do the backup that way.... Well, not really "automatic" in the same sense as you were going for, but automated anyway....

 

[RedTomato]

Mmm, I could try. We're using an old mac mini as a server so I could try setting it up on that.

 

[ChrisA]

Hence my big question: - Is there a way to make the TC automatically backup itself to the USB drive?

On any computer you have that (1) can "see" both the TM drive and the new backup drives and (2) never is powered down.

Set up "rsync" to run as a cron job. It's very simple. The "crontab" command will maintain a cron table. the system looks at this table periodically to find commands it needs to run. yu place the "rsybc" in the tabe and it runs on a schedule you specify. Rsync copies only the changes so it is fast.

All this should already be installed in every Mac.

See man pages for details (type "man rsync" in terminal)