Dan,
I'm a Mac owner, running OSX, but I'm not "into" OSX. I'm more a Linux
person. What I'm looking for is a solution to backup the complete OSX
volumes, including resource forks (what ever they are, but apparently I
*really* want to keep those...) to a remote server on my network. psync
looks like a solution, but the documentation is a little non-specific. Since
I don't want to wipe anything before I go to town, I thought I'd ask this
question. The docs say:
sudo psync -d / /Volumes/I<backup>
Why 'I'?
That's a document bug. POD renders I<italic> to italic but that was in verbatim section so it does not get rendered. Will be fixed in future. Sorry.
And more importantly, is the software smart enough to skip over the volume, and not incorporate the work done to this point back into the archive?
Yes. Just like -xdev option of find(1). Unlike find(1) and cp -r cross-device copying is suppressed by default. But just make sure that / and /Volumes/backup reside on different devices. If they were on the same volume this safety feature does not work (just like -xdev).
Can I NFS mount a volume at /Volumes/remote, and
Yes. But in which case note that some files with unicode names might not be copied properly (many fonts under /Library/Fonts do have those "unsafe" names.
psync -d / /Volumes/remote/Ibackup
And similiarly, what would a restoration process be like? Can I NFS mount
this image (once I've resinstalled OSX), and do a full restore from the
image? And is there anyway to extract single files from the backup set?
The most similar one must be rsync. And to extract single files you don't need to because psync is NOT an archiving utility. You just copy one from backup via cp and such.
Any help/advice you can provide would be greatly appreciated. Oh, and I
looked at rsync_hfs, and talk about about ZERO documentation... In fact, the
docs in the CVS tree just refer to it as 'rsync', so I'm not sure what's
supposed to make rsync_hfs more better. I would theorize it's HFS support,
but there's no discussion about interoperability when moving to remote file
systems (like are attributes and these resource fork things preserved?)
That's why it is on CVS only :) If it were considered stable, there should've been binary distributions already.
Dan the Man with Too Many Codes to Maintain
