Scheduled system backups program

[Charles Swiger]

On Aug 19, 2004, at 12:53 PM, Joshua Lewis wrote:
> They do not have any tape drives only hard drives and to top it all off
> they only have Macs. They are using a dedicated Mac running OS 9.2 
> acting
> as a server.

Tape drives make really good backup devices; backing up to another hard 
drive is not nearly as reliable, although it's good enough to work for 
many people.

> I was hoping I could upgrade that system to OS X and I was wondering if
> there are any FreeBSD utilities that would work for backing up. 
> Otherwise
> I will be setting up a freebsd backup server and I would like to save 
> the
> customer the money and not have to go that route.

OS X comes with the classic Unix backup tools like tar, cpio, pax, and 
dump, as well as rsync.  These deal fine with "normal" files, but fail 
to handle the resource fork used by some classic Mac apps, so be 
careful.  That caution also applies to performing backups to a FreeBSD 
or other machine as a remote backup server.

If you do need to back up "forked" files from HFS, many longtime Mac 
users seem to swear by a product called Retrospect.

> I am sorry for the many OS X questions I have been posting here over 
> the
> last few days but the Darwin mailing list did not respond. Does anyone
> know of a good OS X mailing list I can join?

There are mailing lists at apple.com, of course, as well as Omni's:

http://www.omnigroup.com/developer/mailinglists/

-- 
-Chuck