Finally Backed Up

I love it when things just work. Both my wife and I have Apple laptops that we bought last year. Lynea has an iBook and I have a Powerbook. Until last night we hadn't been doing backups (sound of wrist being slapped). That's now fixed.

At the begining of the week, on the recommendation of one of the Mac mavens at Sun (thanks Flip), I ordered a couple OWC Mercury Elite Pro FW800 80Gb firewire/USB drives. They arrived last night. I realize that I could have done this more cheaply by buying the drives and the firewire enclosures separately from a different vendor and putting them together, but this time I wanted something I could just plug in.

And it was that simple. Power lead (through yet another AC adaptor) and a firewire cable from the drive to the Mac. When I turned it on, up came the disk drive icon on my Desktop. Double clicking bought up a Finder window where I found that they'd stuffed a folder on the disk drive with over a gigabyte of software. I've no idea how useful this is; I haven't checked it out yet.

Onto the backup software. Everybodies favorite is Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC). I downloaded a copy of that and installed it by dragging it to my Applications folder. I also dragged it into the Dock so it was easy to get to.

When I went to run it, I looked at the Preferences and noticed that it wanted me to install psync. I clicked the automatic install button and the operation failed. I'm guessing this was because I'd never previously downloaded any Perl software from CPAN. Anyway, luckily I was able to download the tarball and manually install it.

I actually felt for a moment like I was on a Linux machine as I had to run:

  % tar zxvf MacOSX-File-x.xx.tar.gz
  % cd MacOSX-File-x.xx
  % perl Makefile.PL
  % make
  % make test
  % sudo make install

I love sudo. All platforms should have something like this.

So back to CCC. I fired up the GUI. Selected a source disk (my internal hard drive), and selected a target disk (my external firewire drive). I went to the Preferences popup and told it to create a disk image on the external drive. I clicked the lock icon to authenticate, and then clicked the Clone button. About thirty minutes later I had a backed up disk. From now on, with the nature of syncronized backups, it should go a lot faster.

At work I use rsync to backup the Solaris partition of the disk on my Ferrari laptop, over to a disk on another machine. I had to dredge through the rsync manual pages to work out all the command line options that I'd needed. I now have them all aliased to a single BACKUP command in my startup scripts. How much simpler it was to do this via a well-written GUI.

Later today, I'll do the same setup for my wife's iBook. It would be nice to use an automatic backup setup for our laptops, but the nature of the laptop makes that kind of awkward. I suppose we could remember to plug the laptops into the external drives each night.

Normally I grumble about having to do extra-curricular system-administration duties, but it sure is a pleasure when software (and hardware) are this easy to use.

[Technorati Tag: Software]

( Oct 21 2005, 09:37:38 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink