Re: what's the best way to backup/restore a system?

In article <nospam-B8B1B9.01435702042007@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Luke <nospam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

My question is, what is the best way to backup a mac so that I'm
prepared to restore everything in the event of a disk crash, and then
what is the best way to restore a user account?

For latest Mac OS X, version 10.4.9, one can use 'rsync' (bugs in earlier
versions), which I use to backup /Users/ daily. When restoring, one makes
a new Mac OS X installation where the first account is called say
admin/Administrator. One can then copy in the the old accounts into
/Users/, and then from this first account create accounts with the same
short names from System Preferences -> Accounts. You will be asked if
the directory already there should be used, to which you should answer
yes. This gets an identical account to the

Using 'rsync' is quite tricky. But go to Terminal and type
  touch crontab.txt
  open -t crontab.txt
to create the file named 'crontab.txt and open it in the default text
editor. (Use the <tab> key to complete file names and paths.) Then put in
a single line (probably broken here)
  5    1    *    *    *    /usr/bin/rsync -aEv --delete /Users/
/Volumes/SomeVolume/Users/ > /Users/myhome/backupUsersSomeVolume.txt 2>&1
if you want to make a daily backup 1:05 to the volume named "SomeVolume",
and get the result recorded in the file
  /Users/myhome/backupUsersSomeVolume.txt
Then save the file. You can check it looks right by typing
  less crontab.txt
(Exit 'less' by typing 'q'.)

Then install into the crontab daemon by typing
  sudo crontab crontab.txt
Type
  sudo crontab -l
to see it is installed right. Remove all cron jobs for 'root' by typing
  sudo crontab -r
If you forget 'sudo' then it will not be installed as a cron job of
'root', but your own, in which case the directories not your won in
/Users/ may not be backed up (due to permissions restrictions).

You can check the progress of backups by typing
  tail -f backupUsersExternalHD.txt
Some like the new backup info to be appended rather than overwritten, in
which case the '>' above should be replaced by '>>'. But beware: these
files are very large.

You can try out the backup works fine by typing
  sudo /usr/bin/rsync -aEv ...
where ... is as above. Then use 'tail -f' as above in another Terminal
window to see the progress is fine.

Have fun!

Or wait until Mac OS X, version 10.5, comes by, which has a much better
builtin backup system.

Hans Aberg
.

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