I thought I had a good backup solution in place with BounceBack Express, which came with my Seagate external hard drive, so I upgraded to the Pro version for about $40. Within the first few days, my scheduled daily backups started crashing, and eventually I lost my file selections and exclusion list. I contacted tech support, and 4 days later they responded and asked me to make sure I shut down all other apps before backing up, including any apps that seem like “benign background apps”. Here was my response:
———————————–
Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, it took 4 days and it was not the response I was looking for. Allow me to explain…
I’m a recent convert to the Mac, and I was hoping to find a backup solution that would allow me to schedule nightly backups and have them run reliably regardless of what apps are running. If I could use the built-in Backup program in Windows XP to do this, surely I could find something on the Mac to do the same. If I have to go through the trouble of shutting down my apps before doing a backup, even background apps, then I might as well run the backup manually.
I have since re-installed the software twice, and I suppose I’ll give the scheduled backup one more try before starting to look for another solution. There are two things I still don’t understand, though:
1. Why the crashing didn’t start until the first scheduled backup after installing Pro. (Note that at that time I did not uninstall the previous version, which is the version I received with my Seagate external hard drive).
2. Why I can keep all my apps open and run a backup manually with no problem.
———————————–
I decided to try out Retrospect, which did not make me feel too comfortable after seeing this dialog (hint: where’s the Cancel button?)
Edit: sorry - image no longer available
After figuring out the rather non-intuitive user interface (e.g., you don’t “delete” things, you “forget” them), I performed a manual backup of my home directory with no problem.
I’m sure Retrospect will work just fine, but I got to thinking that the Mac should really come with something out of the box that can do backups. Well - it does - sort of. There’s rsync, which looks great but doesn’t handle resource forks, which if I understand correctly will still be around for a while even though Apple is moving away from them. ditto seems to handle resource forks, but I don’t think it can backup just changed files or delete files from the backup that are no longer on the hard drive.
It was then I discovered psync, a command-line/Perl-based utility, and a nice GUI tool that sits on top of it: psyncx. My first full backup of my home directory was MUCH faster than Retrospect, and I was able to easily schedule a backup to run with no problem. I think the developers of BounceBack need to look at the “man” page of psync - after listing the backup times for several backup trials, they’ll find this:
Note screensaver was on with some other background programs. I used this program happily with my PowerBook G4 (Ti) while I am surfing the web and listening to iTunes at the same time letting SETI@Home search for cosmic programmers
With MacOS X, background backup is no problem
Needless to say, I think I’ll stick with psync and make a donation for psyncx if it all works out.