Guide to backing up using rsync and Automator on OSX Mavericks

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KayJay

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Hey folks, i was recently evaluating my backup workflow and came up with a quick tutorial on how to automate your backups from your hard drive to an external hd, or even one hard drive to another.

Take a look here : http://www.newvibes.com/blog/a-photographers-guide-to-backing-up-using-rsync/

Would be interested to hear of other peoples experiences using Rsync.

The latest version doesn't come installed with Mavericks so this guide also details how to upgrade rsync.
 
Just checked my Mavericks and the version of Rsync is 2.69, the author of the article suggests 3.1.0, if I hadn't already a similar (purchased) app (GoodSync), then I would certainly explore this further, as it seems to do all that is needed to automate and synchronise from one hard drive to another, best of all it's free.

Looks good, thanks for the heads up.
 
I do ALL my backups using rsync and cron - lowest common denominator tools - all useable from the command line. Have them setup on Windows and a variety of *nix machines - the advantage is that the command syntax is the same on every machine. Nice :D
 
PS. absolute version of rsync doesn't really matter IMHO (I seem to be using 3.0.9 on the two machines I looked).
 
The main advantage of using the latest version is the memory performance, it doesn't need to build a file list before performing the file handling. Older versions will work fine though as long as you're not dealing with huge amounts of files. Also note the issue with meta information which can be problematic particularly with movie files.
 
backupList+ is a nice front end for Rsync. Free to download and very easy to set up. It's nice to have a "how to" in Automator though.
 
KayJay said:
The main advantage of using the latest version is the memory performance, it doesn't need to build a file list before performing the file handling. Older versions will work fine though as long as you're not dealing with huge amounts of files. Also note the issue with meta information which can be problematic particularly with movie files.
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Looking at the changelog, there doesn't seem to be any memory improvements - since 3.1.0 was released at the end of September, but 3.0.9 was released over 2 years ago, I'd expect most people to be using 3.0.x (3.0.0 was released in 2008!). A couple of (possibly) useful additions:

  • --exclude-from=<filename> will exclude files from the backup with filenames matching patterns described in <filename>. Useful for not backing up temp files.
  • --delete will trim the destination to look like the source (that is, if you delete a file in the source, it will get deleted in the destination).
  • --delete-excluded will remove any files from the destination that exist in the source directory, but have been excluded from copying
  • You can run rsync over ssh if you want to backup to another computer which doesn't have the drive you want to write to exported as a mappable drive
 
No problems - I find those options really useful - especially the --delete-excluded as if I find a file/file pattern that I want newy excluded, I can add it to the exclude list and it will also trim it from the destination even if it was backed up previously yet still exists on the source. You can trim an awful lot of stuff very easily as you learn which files are taking up a lot of space and are totally useless to back up.
 
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