Backing up to Networks

You can easily backup to any local network volume that can be mounted on your desktop. Just select or drag the destination volume into the destination filed in the main window and you ar good to go.

Networks: Backing up to non local Networks such as AFP ,CIFS (SMB,) NAS, an airdisk, or Time Capsule types of non HFS+ filesystems may have unpredictable results due to the fact that they don't handle file permissions and other attributes that rsync uses to compare files with. Copying personal files may work ok in these situations, or not at all, depending on the type of setup. It is often possible to copy files to these Networks but incremental backups will not work properly, each time copying everything instead of just the changes. Incremental backups do work, sometimes, when "pulling" from the destination rather than copying to them, especially with an airdisk attached to Airport Extreme. System clones will not work at all.


Version 8.0.4 fixesd some issue with network backups

I fixed a bug that caused endless replication of hidden (.dot) files on the network server. Rysnc has been patched to avoid this issue. I also have code which detects when a volume is non-local, network volume and alter some of the rsync options which hopefully avoids many of the common rsync errors one sees when rsync is trying to copy/change various metadata attributes on the network System which aren't supported there. Usually Acl's Hard Links, and Permissions ( especially owners and groups) are not supported on many network drives. This will not usually affect one's own personal files since these metadata are not critical to the performance of them and the actual data in the file is copied fine. Do let me know though if you encounter errors or backups do not work for one of these situations.

As before System clones can not be made with any of the above network devices or protocols. A full System clone needs to be an exact replica of the source drive to be of any use as a clone/restoring volume.

Using the rsync option "--size-only"

This modifies rsync's "quick check" algorithm for finding files that need to be transferred, changing it from the default of transferring files with either a changed size or a changed last-modified time to just looking for files that have changed in size. This is useful when starting to use rsync after using another mirroring system which may not preserve time stamps exactly. Note: you will need to do this in the "expert options" settings panel and must understand how to set up the string of options for rsync to use. See Expert options for more...

Remote backups?

I am working on this at the moment and can help you set up a remote backup over ssh using backuplist+. If you are familiar with the Terminal application it is easy to do. The next release of backuplist+ will hopefully have this feature enabled to make it easy for users to do.