On Panther, I used to rely on Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) to schedule a daily backup of my /Users directory to my external FireWire drive. Now CCC doesn't work properly on Tiger, I've developed a way of doing the same thing using the enhanced rsync command that comes with Tiger and supports forks. Hopefully this may help someone out while CCC is being updated.
To do this, enter the following in the Terminal:
sudo vi /etc/daily.local
Add the following to this file (or if it is empty, just type it in):
echo "Starting Daily rsync backup on `date`"
for FSYS in /Users
do
/usr/bin/rsync -aE --delete $FSYS /Volumes/Backup
if [ $? != 0 ]; then
echo " ==> Error during rsync of $FSYS"
else
echo "rsync of $FSYS OK on `date`"
fi
done
echo "Finished Daily rsync backup at `date`"
Now save this file (change /Volumes/Backup to match your desired backup location). Check it is owned by root:wheel and has permissions 750. That's it. launchd will now run this as part of the periodic daily command. If you want to run it manually, type:
launchctl start com.apple.periodic-daily
You can then check the output file in /var/log/daily.out. Hope that helps in the short term while CCC sorts itself out.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050505072407618