Hello all, This weekend I have just upgraded my macbook pro from 10.5 to 10.6 (bit late i know) I wanted to give this installation a clean slate, rather than just move my old profile with all the junk. For the last few months, rather than using time machine I have been using the service crashplan, paying for their unlimited online storage and backing up my home directory (minus the downloads folder)
Now for free you can use the software to backup to any other computer, a local or network drive or a friends computer over the internet, the only bit you are paying for is for their online storage, The software works with linux, mac os, windows and solaris, and so I installed the client on my big windows machine with lots of disk space, and took a backup of my full home drive from the macbook pro to my local windows box. So i spent a few hours wiping the macbook pros hard drive and installing 10.6 + the updates, then installed crashplan and logged in. It sees you are on a different computer, and gives you the option to treat it as such, or to "adopt" the old account. The adopt option is typically used when a machine has been stolen or replaced, and so the old files show up as missing, and I can pick and choose to restore them in the usual way. The deleted items will remain there for however long the file retention policy says to. The only hicup I had, which is a good thing really, is that the files and folders I restored had my old user as the owner and were read only, so I simply changed permissions in finder and made my new laptops "me" as the owner. So feature wise and now in practice, this software has proven to me to be a huge success, and I can't recommend it highly enough! It just runs in the background like time-machine, but you can choose the frequency of backups and how much that it keeps. (the default options are exactly the same as time machines), so for macs its a case of who cares, but the brilliant thing is it works exactly the same way for windows and linux users too. obviously the interface for restoring files isn't as pretty as time machine but you can't have everything. So crashplan then. (crashplan.com) I dont work for them, I dont get paid to write this, I'm just really impressed with it. Toby oh, and one last cool cool thing - it automatically de-duplicates the data it backs up, because I have been restoring files from my windows computer backup (which then obviously get immeditately backed up again) but the amount of space the backup set is taking hasn't doubled in size, so it knows that these are files it already has. So thats another feature thats working out great in practice -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sussex Mac User Group" group. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/smug?hl=en-GB.
