SilverKeeper - A freeware GUI backup tool

Apr 21, '04 11:28:00AM

Contributed by: robg

Silverkeeper imageThe macosxhints Rating:
8 of 10
[Score: 8 out of 10]

There are many backup options for OS X -- everything from Retrospect to CCC to the command line, and probably seven other apps I've not listed. I won't claim to have tried them all. I own a couple of them, and have used a number of others. This week's Pick is yet another option in the category, and I picked it because (a) it's free, (b) it's relatively easy to use, (c) it seems to do the job quite well, and (d) (very cool!) it will wake your Mac to run your specified backups.

I was looking for a quick and simple way to back up key directories on my machine to my backup hard drive, and I wanted to be able to keep multiple aged copies of some of those directories. Although I could've used one of the solutions I already own, or rolled my own via cron and the command line, I like to try new stuff, so off I went in search of alternatives. I'm not sure where I found it, but I stumbled on LaCie's SilverKeeper after some Googling. The SilverKeeper interface is quite clean, with a left-side pop-up for the backup set name and source, right-side pop-up for the backup type and destination, and a window below with four tabs for Status, Schedule, Options, and Exclusions.

You use SilverKeeper by creating a new set and giving it a name ('robg_home'), then pointing to the source folder. On the other side of the screen, you choose the type of backup -- I'm simply using "Backup Set," which is a standard backup, but you can also synchronize or compare the source and destination. In the tabbed window below, the Status tab starts blank, but will show log information after a backup run. The Schedule tab lets you set the schedule for the chosen set. This part of the interface is a bit unwieldy, as it uses a pop-up for Daily and each day of the week. The default is Daily; if you want a backup only on a particular day, you first click the pop-up and uncheck Daily. Then you have to click the pop-up again, and click (or unclick) each day you do (or do not) want seen. So if you want only a Thursday backup, you click the pop-up something like eight times. This would be much better handled by a checkbox arrangement, but you really only have to worry about it once for each backup set. There's also a lock icon here which you can use to prevent the machine from waking from sleep to run its backups, as well as a "Backup on startup" checkbox.

On the Options tab, you can create multiple backup copies -- I have checked "Copy set to folder" with three copies for my Home folder; this basically gives me three complete daily "look back" backups to pick from, if I ever need them (also remember to check Never Remove Files if you use this option). Finally, the Exclusions tab lets you specify portions of the source that you don't want backed up. On my Home folder backup, for instance, I have excluded the Library -> Caches and Library -> Icons folders.

Although SilverKeeper runs from the Finder, it copies invisible files (all the dot files in my home directory are backed up daily), and handles ownership and permissions as well (I backup my Webserver folder, and all the root/admin permissions are kept exactly as they should be). Each backup set can have separate schedules, which lets you easily customize your backup routine -- I back up my web server and home folders daily, my less-often-used data storage drives every other day, and my major applications and video editing drives on a weekly basis. Since the machine will wake itself up to run the backups, I have them all set to run at 2:00am, when my machine is (usally!) not doing anything other than sleeping.

SilverKeeper isn't perfect, but given that it's free, it does an amazingly good job at what it does. It's not for everyone -- if you need to backup to tape, for instance, you'll need a more full-blown backup program. But iif you have a need for hard drive copy of your key data files, it's probably worth a look-see.

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