Posted September 21st, 2005 @ 08:51am by Erik J. Barzeski
I thought that Backup 3.0 would allow me to back up nightly, one disk to another. I didn't even care so much if the backup wasn't bootable.
I awake this morning to an error: insufficient free space on the destination.
Phooey, Backup. Are you still this useless?
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Posted 21 Sep 2005 at 10:38am #
This happened to me too. For some (daft) reason, by default it set the backups to copy to the same drive. I had to manually go in, delete that backup rule, and create a new one that pointed to my LaCie drive instead of my main drive. It worked from then on.
Posted 21 Sep 2005 at 10:48am #
Not quite the same thing… I properly had it set to go to the backup (other) disk drive, but it had a previous backup there, and so Backup didn't think there was enough free space.
Hopefully with a Backup-driven backup, it'll realize it doesn't need to copy all the files and will over-write and maybe delete some files. I doubt it, though, and the quest for a good backup solution will probably continue.
Posted 21 Sep 2005 at 11:06am #
My fingers are crossed that it's working, all three of my backups worked last night. Which is more than I can say for 2.0.
Posted 21 Sep 2005 at 1:04pm #
I like this Backup better than the last one. I'm using it for more of my backups, particularly my iTMS purchases since it does that without having to filter by file extension. For the rest of my backups, I've been using ChronoSync for over a year now. I can't think of any complaints I've had about it. It runs on my schedule and catches up on any backup it missed while the machine was sleeping.
Posted 21 Sep 2005 at 1:33pm #
Yeah, you probably set it to backup to your local hard drive. If you plug in a FireWire drive, it stands to reason that you'd have to tell Backup which drive that is and where on it you want to backup.
Posted 22 Sep 2005 at 7:26pm #
Ugh, Backup 3.0 backs up to a flat file. Nightly backups are just about useless - I can't retrieve just one file. Why can't it just copy the damn files across? The simplest thing in the world.
Again, the search for a good backup solution continues. Backup ain't it (and I'm hesitant to spring $100 for Synchronize Pro X).
Posted 22 Sep 2005 at 7:45pm #
just use rsync. or better still, rsyncx
http://archive.macosxlabs.org/rsyncx/rsyncx.html
using rsyncx (even rsync) will create bootable drives and should not break any apple stuff.
Posted 22 Sep 2005 at 8:10pm #
I long used psync over rsync because rsync had several issues, IIRC.
Posted 22 Sep 2005 at 10:05pm #
I noticed that it saved to a flat file as well, but when i double clicked the file it opened in backup and i have the option of restoring the entire backup or i could manually select files to restore.
Im not sure what you mean when you say you cant retrieve a single file...
Posted 22 Sep 2005 at 10:10pm #
I meant that I can't navigate to a file and grab it. Easily. Without launching Backup. In other words, from the command line, the Finder, etc. Ideally, it'd just copy the files over.
Posted 23 Sep 2005 at 10:00pm #
Actually, the 'flat file' is a package containing a sparseimage of the backed up files from the run in question. So if you really don't want to launch Backup, you can just mount the image, and browse its file system.
I'm a little puzzled as to your reluctance to use the very program you used to create the backup to do a restore. At least the actual storage mechanism isn't completely proprietary, unlike some other backup solutions I could mention.
At any rate, the flat file makes much more sense in terms of space efficiency and compression, which is nice when you're backing up to the incredibly slow iDisk servers.
Posted 24 Sep 2005 at 7:51am #
The reluctance is to use the application in the first place. psync, when I used it, simply copied the files AND the system was bootable from the backup disk. When I wanted to restore one copy of a file, I'd just copy it back over.
Posted 25 Sep 2005 at 2:12am #
It looks like Apple Backup 3 switch to XMLRPC. It checks http://www.mac.com/WebObjects/Info.woa/wa/XMLRPC/accountInfo instead of http://www.mac.com/WebObjects/Info.woa/wa/Query to check for the iToolsBackupActivated variable (though the .Mac preference pane still calls the old URL). Anyone know what the schema of the response is for the new URL so us poor folks who rolled their own .Mac can get Backup 3 out of trial mode? 🙂
It'd also be interesting to see what http://www.mac.com/WebObjects/Info.woa/wa/dotMacPreferencesPaneMessage returns. Does the .Mac preference pane's text ever change?
Posted 03 Feb 2006 at 11:02pm #
I am having problems with the latest version of Backup with the latest version of Tiger.
Backup cycles through a complete backup process of 32 Gb of data that I was trying to backup to an external 100 Gb harddrive but after nearly an hour and what appeared to be a successful back... the error messaged showed up... Error: Backup archive is in use and can't be ejected??????
HELP! SUGGESTIONS?