[OSX-Users] Re: Back up of Time Machine

[Steve Harris]

Maybe there's something odd in my setup, but in the office TimeMachine (running on a Mac mini, with a firewire raid array attached) seems to create one DMG image per backup client. Rsyncing that DMG file should be easy, though it might be very inefficient - not sure what proportion of the blocks change with each backup.

Incidentally, Retrospect can handle multiple backup destinations, but in general the software is diabolical, and best avoided.

- Steve

On 25 Sep 2011, at 01:59, Hugh Glaser wrote:

> Well, just as I hit "Send", CCC crapped out after copying a little bit.
> So now I'm trying to create an img of the folder using Disk Utility.
> Sigh.
> 
> On 25 Sep 2011, at 01:44, Hugh Glaser wrote:
> 
>> What do you do for Time Machine backup?
>> 
>> I am getting irritated about this.
>> I used to have TM on my Windows server on a hardware RAID.
>> So no off-site backup, but protection against device failure, and worked fine.
>> But I wanted to pension off the old Dell, and I have a MacMini that is running in any case (my TV).
>> So I bought a couple of boxes from Dabs that I could put the Sata disk in (£8.32 each, which is good for letting me use 750GB 3.5" disks on the Mac - and the box for a 2.5" is 3.80!)
>> The software RAID was not so good (I think I kicked out the power cord while writing), so I decided it was too fragile, and bought a 3TB disk to do the whole job.
>> 
>> But that still doesn't give me my TM backup - I need to be able to copy the TM from the 3TB to one of the 750's.
>> But the Finder won't let me - it reports that the disk is not suitable for copying because of case issues.
>> Lying piece of shit - I formatted the disk as case-sensitive just so that I could do the copy, because I had seen the message before, and in any case it is com in got a non-case-sensitvie disk. Probably about hardware links to directories, but never mind.
>> Is it really the case that the only way to do this is with Carbon Copy Cloner, rsync, or whatever?
>> 
>> And all this is because Apple won't let me easily do TM to more than one TM.
>> 
>> We waited years for a decent backup system for the Mac, but it is still hard to protect against device failure of the TM backup.
>> Oh well, at least when it is finished I will be able to have an off-site backup at last.
>> I suppose it will finish - it has just generated an extra 7GB of swap space preparing to clone.
>> 
>> 
> 
> -- 
> Hugh Glaser,  
>              Web and Internet Science
>              Electronics and Computer Science,
>              University of Southampton,
>              Southampton SO17 1BJ
> Work: +44 23 8059 3670, Fax: +44 23 8059 3045
> Mobile: +44 75 9533 4155 , Home: +44 23 8061 5652
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~hg/
> 
> 
>