A couple years ago, I duct-tape-and-baling-twined a backup strategy together with rsync and ical with an offsite backup to the down defunct StrongSpace.

Since then, I’ve attempted to use Apple’s TimeMachine – both with a local drive and a driver connected to my AirPort Extreme.

Too frequently, I ended up corrupt backup files or the backups would completely fail. Additionally, when TimeMachine was running – my MacBook Pro would slow to an unusable crawl.

I’ve revisited my original rsync script to make a bootable, full-disk backup

Every night when I’m done working, I (manually, for the time being) kick off the rsync script in Terminal.app.

As of this writing it makes 3 backups of my MacBook Pro to 3 different drives; a full disk bootable backup, a user account backup to a portable drive, and a user account backup to a network drive (additionally it backs up my Kindle to the network drive).

Here’s the script

# RSYNC A BOOTABLE BACKUP ON THE FULL BACKUP DRIVE
sudo rsync -xrlptgoEv --progress --delete / /Volumes/Full_Backup_Drive_Name

# RSYNC MY USER ACCOUNT TO THE PORTABLE DRIVE
rsync -rltv --exclude='.*' ~/ /Volumes/Portable_Drive_Name/MacBookPro_Backup/

# RSYNC MY USER ACCOUNT TO THE NETWORK DRIVE
rsync -rltv --exclude='.*' ~/ /Volumes/Network_Drive_Name/MacBookPro_Backup/


On top of that, CrashPlan is backing up to both a networked drive and a portable drive.

Yes, I fully expect my MacBook Pro to completely die at any moment.

This post was inspired by Peter Fleck’s ‘Backing up is hard to do’