Why should computer maintenance & backup be Next Actions?

[ehd]

I use a PowerBook (just one) daily and I know the value of running
maintenance routines and backing up. My PowerBook sleeps during the
night.

Question 1: Given today's backup and maintenance software, do you just
leave it on autopilot and not add "Backup" or "Run maintenance scripts"
to your Next Action/To Do list? Can we rely on the software that allows
scheduling?

Second question: To automate Firewire backups and PowerBook maintenance
what software do you use? (I.e. is Cocktail the ONLY app that lets you
schedule maintenance? Is Retrospect Express superior to Carbon Cloner
or Silverkeeper?)

Apologies if this query is best posted on a more technical site...

[Kirk McElhearn]

On Apr 25, 2005, at 10:15 PM, ehd wrote:

> Question 1: Given today's backup and maintenance software, do you just
> leave it on autopilot and not add "Backup" or "Run maintenance
> scripts"
> to your Next Action/To Do list? Can we rely on the software that
> allows
> scheduling?

It's not really a response to your question, but the maintenance
scripts are totally useless for most Macs - unless you run a server,
you shouldn't worry yourself. I always wonder why such a big thing is
made about these scripts. If they were that essential, don't you
think Apple would have had them set to run at normal times?


Kirk

Author of: The Mac OS X Command Line: Unix Under the Hood
- - - - - -
Read my blog: Kirkville -- http://www.mcelhearn.com
Musings, Opinion and Miscellanea, on Macs, iPods and more
Kirk McElhearn | Chemin de la Lauze | 05600 Guillestre | France

[Lorin Rivers]

On 4/25/05, Kirk McElhearn <kirk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Apr 25, 2005, at 10:15 PM, ehd wrote:
>
> It's not really a response to your question, but the maintenance
> scripts are totally useless for most Macs - unless you run a server,
> you shouldn't worry yourself. I always wonder why such a big thing is
> made about these scripts. If they were that essential, don't you
> think Apple would have had them set to run at normal times?

Kirk,

That said, there are ways to trigger automatic backups at specified times.

You could add an item to your cron (the thing that drives the scripts
you referred to previously) that initiates your backup with an
AppleScript or some such.

There are some good GUIs for cron, (e.g., Cronnix) check MacUpdates
for all of them. You might want to take a look at <a
href"http://www.bombich.com/software/lwm.html">LoginWindowManager</a>
as well.

[Brock Tice]

I use a simple script triggered by cron to back up my computers to
available storage, but only when it's there. For example, my laptop at
work backs up every night to our fileserver, but to figure out if it can
it checks that my home drive from the fileserver is mounted first. It
actually backs up over rsync (which I recommend.) My desktop, which runs
linux and not OS X, backs up to an external 500GB drive, but only when
it's mounted as well. The script runs every night, but the first thing
it does is check to see if the drive is there.

There are some more complicated schemes that you can use that will
rotate backups using hardlinks and so on. I'm actually using one of
those on the desktop, which effectively gives me three days' backups for
less than the amount of space required by 3x the data set.

--
Brock M. Tice
Ph.D. Student, Tulane University
Department of Biomedical Engineering
504-296-5872
bt...@tulane.edu
NOTE: All dates / times in ISO format,
America/Central time unless
otherwise specified

[Paul M]

Someone has ported anacron for OSX
(http://www.alastairs-place.net/anacron.html) which is the solution
used elsewher in the *nix world to dela with missed cron jobs (if your
computer is switched off for example). Its basically a cron replacement
that does what cron does, but also keeps an eye out for missed jobs, and
runs them when it gets a chance.

Paul M
--
"There are no innocent bystanders
what were they doing there in the first place?"
-- William. S. Burroughs

[Darren Collins]

If you're going to rely on automatic scripts, I'd suggest you create a
monthly task to check that the scripts are working properly. That might
be just checking their output logs for errors or suspicious messages,
or it might entail attempting to access some random files out of a
backup set.

Several times I've seen people religiously follow a backup procedure
for years, only to discover on the day of disaster that they weren't
backing up what they thought they were backing up, or that their backup
set is not readable for some reason.

Darren.
http://www.pool-room.com

[Nik]

On Apr 25, 2005, at 2:15 PM, ehd wrote:

> Second question: To automate Firewire backups and PowerBook
> maintenance
> what software do you use? (I.e. is Cocktail the ONLY app that lets you
> schedule maintenance? Is Retrospect Express superior to Carbon Cloner
> or Silverkeeper?)

If you're interested in a detailed analysis of backup strategies and
options, I highly recommend dropping a few bucks on the Take Control
of MacOS X Backups eBook.

<http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/backup-macosx.html>

The short answer is that, yes, Retrospect is superior to CCC or
Silverkeeper for backups. (Although CCC might beat it out for just
duplicating disks.)

--Nik