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Time Machine best backup option on Leopard?

Posted on 22/3/2008, 3:39 am, by Colin Charles, under General.

Dear Lazyweb,

Is the best way to backup Mac OS X Leopard, Time Machine? Will it give me full, reliable restores, in case all goes to hell?

On Linux, I use rdiff-backup, which is a phenomenal tool, that is quick and easy to use from the command line. Its restores are proven (even across Linux distributions). Do I need to bother with it on OS X?

Is Time Machine space efficient? My Macbook comes with a 250GB hard disk, and the largest 2.5″ disk I can buy is a 320GB disk, and that’s currently what I use for Time Machine backups (no, I will not carry a 3.5″ disk for backups – I travel a lot).

Thanks

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4 Comments

  1. Cafuego says:
    22/3/2008 at 4:11 am

    Time machine does take a bit more space on your backup disk, as it will backup your WHOLE system, not just the dirs you’d point rdiff-backup at, but I think the conveniece of restoring to a working system would outweigh the space issue.

  2. byte says:
    22/3/2008 at 4:20 am

    Thanks Peter! I’ll just use Time Machine and hopefully, never have to worry about running out of space on the 320gb disk…

  3. Cafuego says:
    22/3/2008 at 4:25 am

    Time machine will tell you when the disk is full and you can then discard entire snapshots to make space available again, more or less similar to the –remove-older-than option to rdiff-backup.

  4. Time Machine best backup option on Leopa … says:
    22/3/2008 at 4:44 am

    […] http://www.bytebot.net/blog/archives/2008/03/22/time-machine-best-backup-option-on-leopard asks Hoosgot, […]

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