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Which Backup application would meet my needs?

Sharky II

Sharky II

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jan 6, 2004
1,002
404
United Kingdom
Hi guys

Sorry for the boring topic, but i need some help backing stuff up.

I have a studio with a Mac Pro with 4 internal HD's and an external, and am looking for some advice on how to backup 3 folders. Here are my relevant drives:

- System Drive 1TB (only using a small amount of space on this, soon to be replaced by SSD. Contains a folder on desktop with latest compositions)
- Audio Drive 1TB (Contains all recordings and compositions)
- Time Machine Drive 1TB (backs up most of the two above, lots of spare space)
- External FW800 500GB drive used to back up 3 specific 'important' folders

I use Time Machine to back up all of my System Drive and Audio Drive, except for things which i have on DVD (like large sample libraries), and that works fine.

I'm trying to get extra security by backing up 3 important folders on the FW800 Drive. 2 of these folders are on the Audio Drive, and 1 is on the System Drive (the folder on my Desktop). I want to have some sort of incremental back up of these three folders.

I've been using Carbon Copy Cloner to copy these 3 folders across to the FW800 drive, but i've been having annoying issues with it - e.g. suddenly after a CCC software update it started archiving all incremental backups, wasting tonnes of space. I made a custom profile so that it doesn't do that, and all of a sudden, it seems to be deleting the stuff off my main drive after copying across. I'm confused and annoyed by the software. I'm pretty sure i'm doing everything correctly.

I just want to clone these 3 folders so that i can keep the FW800 drive in a different location, in case the place floods/burns/is burgled.

It could be user error, but i find CCC far more complicated than i need it to be. I just want to be able to open the app and it automatically and incrementally copy these 3 folders to the FW800 drive.

I want it to be the same as manually dragging/dropping the 3 folders on the FW800 drive (which is what i'm currently doing), but only moving modified files and new folders. I do NOT want it to delete what's on my main working drives.

Is there a 'nice' way to do this, or shall i continue to manually drag and drop at the end of the day? That currently seems to be the most straightforward way.

Thanks, and sorry for waffling.
 
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CCC is pretty solid, most of what it does it set options for rsync (the *nix program that's actually doing all the copying, etc).

It should not be deleting stuff off the disk you are copying FROM, unless the settings are extremely tangled up, or you have some sort of other strange issue happening.

I personally use a combination of Time Machine, CCC, and just rsync scripts launched by CRON.

I would use Apple's Disk Utility.app to verify your drives, repair permissions, etc. Then trash your copy of CCC, along with the prefs, download a new one, and start with a clean slate.

If issues persist, I'd also take a look at whatever drives are giving you problems with something like Disk Warrior or Data Rescue and see what it has to say about the overall health of your drives.

If you don't like CCC, SuperDuper is petty much the same thing, in a paid app:

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

Just manually copying 3 folders every day, isn't a very tenable long-term solution, and depends way too much on you doing stuff that your computer can easily do automatically.
 
I use Crashplan to make a local server-based backup, as well as an offsite backup.
 
Hi guys, thanks for your advice!

I've gotten a fresh install of CCC, after deleting the app and the prefs/application support.

I think part of the problem is that i'm copying 3 specific folders from 2 different HD's.

Do these settings look right to you, to achieve what i want? (attached)

I am just doing stuff from the audio drive at the moment. I deleted 2 of the folders and am doing the attached process from scratch now. But that's not the hard bit - it's what happens when i want to do an incremental update, that will be the issue.

One thing that is very annoying about CCC when selecting only specific folders, is that any time you add a NEW folder on that drive (which will be quite often), it automatically 'ticks' it, instead of automatically excluding it. So you have to go through the entire HD every time to exclude everything other than what you want. Is there a way to change this?

I've tried SuperDuper, but it doesn't really seemed geared up for this kind of 'specific folder backup' either.

Thanks!
 

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I have been using Deja Vu for over a year now, and am quite pleased. It will back-up individual folders of your choosing manually, or automatically on a specified schedule. Once installed, it sits in your System Preferences in the "Other" or preference pane section. Very simple and intuitive. (No, I don't work for them). :p

I use it to back-up certain folders to an external LaCie RAID array attached via Firewire 800 to my iMac.

http://propagandaprod.com/
 
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Sharky II said:
Do these settings look right to you, to achieve what i want? (attached)
Click to expand...

Not really. If you just want to copy one folder - use "choose a folder" under "select a source". Then do the same for "select a destination" (make the destination folder if required). i.e. back folder to folder, not part of disk to disk.
 
Sounds like we're in a similar situation.

To simply backup 3 folders, I like SmartBackup. It can be configured to backup the folders at launch, then quit.

Alternately, if you want to clone drives, you might consider SuperDuper. It is more streamlined than CCC and also has great features for AppleScript.

In my case, I have an AppleScript that runs SuperDuper to clone my two drives (boot and data) and runs SmartBackup to copy the contents of my Time Capsule (which I use as a network drive rather than for Time Machine).

I also run CCC on my other Macs to back them up to the external drive. That way, I have a central drive with bootable backups.
 
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