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Backup Mac->Linux?
Authored by: awk on Jul 21, '03 01:10:10PM

What's the best way to backup from a Mac to a BSD machine?

At the moment I use Retrospect Express FTP feature but it's not very good, I don't like the interface and it constantly chokes on some Unicode filenames. And FTP is something I'd like to get rid of in general.

Can RsyncX copy HFS files to a Linux machine? I'd think it would be possible by treating the resource fork as a second file. If not I was thinking of trying NFS-mounting the backup dir and using RsyncX to copy from the Mac to the backup dir, though I don't think rsync is optimized for this kind of setup.



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Backup Mac->Linux?
Authored by: olve on Jul 22, '03 04:47:27PM

This is exactly what I currently do and my reason for looking into rsync was to get away from Retrospect. Unfortunately, I also confirmed with the rsync_hfs team that you cannot use rsync to backup to linux volumes without losing your resource forks.

I have not tried the follwing scenario fully, but I think it will work pretty well to use psync to backup to an NFS mount from a Linux box or another Mac. Psync does work to this type of volume, and if you set up automounting (see the NFS Manager program), then the remote volume should always be available to psync. You can also make the mountpoint a bit obscure (e.g. /mnt/xxx) to keep the backup volume from appearing on the desktop.

Unfortunately, if you want to psync everything then psync runs as root and it must then have root equivalent access on the NFS mount from the remote machine. Depending on your network and system setup, this may or may not be palatable. At least you can restrict the NFS mounts by IP of client machines. BTW, I think there is also an option in psync to save permission/ownership stuff in a separate file without modifying the files themselves on the destination.

I think this is what I will try next. There is probably some clever read-only trick in NFS to remount the backup directory (or a subdirectory thereof) as read-only so people can restore their data without risk of overwriting the backup. Of course, you will probably have to edit UID and GID in NetInfo to match your OSX users with Linux users so that they can see their backed up files.

Frankly, this would be so much easier if rsync_hfs would just work reliably and in server mode under OSX !!!



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