Thanks Chris for this.
With best wishes
Simon
On 3 Jul 2008, at 16:59, Chris Blouch wrote:
So your external USB drive should show up on your desktop with a
name, whatever name you gave it. To make it easier the drive name
shouldn't have a space in it so something like External or Backup
would be good. The folder the backup goes into is part of the
terminal command. So if your external drive is called External and
you just want to back up your user files to a folder called
MyBackups the command would be
rsync -av --delete /Users/yourhomefoldername/* /Volumes/External/
MyBackups
I think there is a shortcut for your home folder name which is ~ So
you could also do
rsync -av --delete ~/* /Volumes/External/MyBackups
CB
Simon Cavendish wrote:
So Chris, if I have a usb external hard drive plugged into my
macbook, and on it I create a folder mybackup, what would I type in
the terminal?
I am totally ignorant but eager to bakcup my ersonal files. I guess
I'd be backing up my home folder where my personal files are. Is
that right? I've never used terminal before so if you could give me
some more explanations about terminal, I'd be gratefu. Feel free to
e-mail me off list. Having recently lost my computer through some
electrical surge, I'm eager to protect my material.
With many thanks
Simon
On 2 Jul 2008, at 20:32, Chris Blouch wrote:
You can also use rsync from the terminal to copy everything
somewhere else. I usually just backup my users folder since
everything else I can reinstall. From the terminal do
rsync -avz --delete /Users/cblouch/* destination/folder
The destination can either be another directory like an external
firewire drive called Backup in a folder called MyBackup
rsync -av --delete /Users/cblouch/* /Volumes/backup/MyBackup
if you turn on ssh access on another mac you can backup to a
folder on that machine instead. So if the IP address of the other
machine is 192.168.130.10 and I have an account on that machine
called cblouch I can backup to a folder in cblouch called MyBackup
by doing
rsync -avz --delete /Users/cblouch/* [EMAIL PROTECTED]:MyBackup
The first time this will take a bit but after that it only copies
over anything that has changed since the last time you ran it. the
z option compresses stuff before transferring it which works well
when copying over a network. I leave the z option out when copying
to another local drive. The --delete option says that if a file
has been deleted from the source then also delete it from the
backup. In other words, the backup will be a mirror of your
folder. If you leave --delete out, deleting files on your local
machine will not delete them from the backup. In other words, your
backup will keep getting bigger and bigger.
Hope this helps. A little more effort but its free.
CB
Chelsea wrote:
I learned a hard lesson today when i went to wake up my Mac. It
wouldn't wake up. Even when i pushed the power button, nothing. I
had a feeling that I'd have to bring it in to Apple, and probably
end up losing all data. Well, thankfully my mom was talking with
someone who is a Mac geek, and got it to wake up. Lesson learned.
You never know when your computer will decide to quit working. If
you can, backup as often as possible. The sad thing is, I had
learned about that in my business class, but didn't do anything
about it until my computer went crazy.
I hope this doesn't happen to anyone else. If it does, just hold
down the power button, and it will beep at you. Let up from the
button and you will be in the log-in screen. :) I'm thankful it
was just taking a longer sleep!
Have a great day,
Chelsea
