Your answer to 3 is interesting. I use iPhoto. and this app is copying pictures from a folder called original to modified if the picture is modified. Wonder how rsync deals with different pictures with the same filename?

I have actually been thinking to upgrade to Leopard to get Timemachine. My Synology NAS has Timemachine functionality, but it would be nice to have a test environment to work with it in order to see how it fits my needs. And ultimately have a backup before I do it.

Just for info: My NAS is then daily backing up to Amazon S3 online storage. This was very easy to setup in the NAS. Which is a setup I am very happy about. But getting a consistent easy backup from the mac to the NAS seems a bit cumbersome.

I have tried iBackup, Backuplist+, SyncSyncSync (or something the like) but I do not believe I am there yet. Looking forward to hear about your conclusion of the current evaluation of CCC and Jungledisk.

Currently I use Time Machine but that doesn’t work at all well for me since I use File Vault (which means my personal files only get backed up when I log out and I don’t get any of the restore capabilities). Your timing is actually interesting because right now I’m trying to evaluate a new set up. My current leaning is to use something like Carbon Copy Cloner to do occasionally full bootable backups and use Jungledisk to do local incremental (encrypted) backups of key files.

1) I vaguely remember this problem and equally vaguely remember that you could just disable the script, but it would always show up. It’s a bug in RsyncX. I don’t think RsyncX is even supported any more, not officially anyways.

2) I don’t remember that happening so I don’t have anything useful to say.

3) No, you won’t have to do a full backup. What’s actually happening is that each of the incremental directories is linked to the same file instances (when the files haven’t changed). So when the 25th backup is completed (again, I’m doing this from old memories) it will be linked to all the files that were in the system. Only then will the 1st backup folder be deleted. Any files that existed in the 1st backup folder and no where else (e.g. aren’t linked to any of the other backup folders) will be deleted but all the other files will be left alone. So once you get Rsync running you shouldn’t have to do anything. It will automatically maintain each and every file needed to make sure each and every backup is 100% complete. The real trick is that because it uses linking to the files if two or more folders contain the same file (e.g. the file didn’t change over the backups) then only one physical instance of the file (with two or more file system links) exist on the drive.

4) The backups aren’t done by RsyncX. They are done by Rsync. RsyncX is just a GUI that sits on top of Rsync. When you set up the CRON jobs that is what will cause Rsync to run. So once the CRON jobs (as described in the article) are running you shouldn’t have to do anything else.

I rally appreciate this outline. I have as well been all over to find a free well working backup solution. I have setup an incremental backup of my local mac (users) to my NAS, which is mounted on startup. Fully as described in your beginning section before remote… I have 4 Q’s that I hope you can help with?

1) in the RsyncX scheduler window I have modified and add’ed acording your description but I cannot delete the wrong script. Do you know about this and what to do?

2) I am constantly prompted for admin PW, can this be turned of? Or stored in RsyncX somewhere.

3) Doing Incremental backup say daily 24 times before overwriting the first one made. Will I then on day 25 have a full backup of my users folder, as the first one made will be, or will I only have the changes from day 24 to 25. Meaning that I will have to schedule a full copy of users every 24 day in a seccond script?

4) Does RsyncX need to be started upon each reboot in order for the schedule to work or will it work even though the application is not running?

I hope you are willing to help me out.

Thanks
Mads

Hi,

thanks for your description of RSyncX.

It's not entirely true that buying software would have been a better solution, at least not for me!

I already started using RsyncX myself even though I own a copy of Retrospect that came with my Maxtor OneTouch. At least that version of Retrospect does not allow you to make a backup over a network, which is a KO ctiterion for me. I don't know whether another version of Retrospect will allow network backups or whether you have to buy extensions to this software.

Nevertheless, I decided to stay away from Retrospect completely in part because I find the user experience “strange” and non-Mac like, which always makes me very cautious. But what really founded my decision is the user experience I got for the latest Retrospect version under Windows XP on my DELL M60. UNUSABLE! The application doesn't even paint its GUI correctly. So there I had to fall back to earlier version that's halfway decent.

I think RSyncX may be difficult to set up, but once you have it running it's a very nice tool.

Thanks for your decription once again!

Regards,

Gert