kugelfish

Since my previous experiments with Apple's Time-Machine online backup solution had not turned out as expected, but I really like the idea of continuous online backup - specially since the new 10.5 Leopard release does not seem as stable any more as my old 10.2 Panther release. The basic idea is to use rsync, which is an efficient and robust way to synchronize two file-system trees over the network. This article for example explains in much detail, how to use rsync and unix-file system hard-links to create multiple snapshots of a filesystem tree over time and only consume disk-space for the files which have change in the meantime. Minus the fancy GUI, sounds a lot like what Time-Machine is trying to do... For my purpose a few monthly snapshots are more than good enough with the current one being kept reasonably well in sync - daily at least, as long as the laptop happens to be online long enough for the changes to be pushed over. Since the network is private, I am using a native

The latest version of Mac Os comes with automated backup system called time machine, which besides the cool GUI is basically taking periodic snapshots of all changes and saves them to an attached disk. Since my new 17' Powerbook is suspended most of the time and moving back and forth between home and office, any solution which assumes a static environment is going to be challenging. I was hoping for a solution which would automatically back up any changes incrementally to my linux server at home, whenever the laptop finds itself on that network. This means, the system would have to auto discover its network environment and deal with interruptions, since I am not going to wait for any invisible backup job to complete before closing the laptop again. Following these instructions , I created an AFP share from my linux server, including a bonjour zero-conf advertisement, which can easily be discovered in the network neighborhood and mounted as a share on the mac. Despite Apple'