Getting Backups Going at Home
With the fixing of the Mac Mini at home, it seems like a really good time to get the backups going there for the kids laptops and for Liza's as well. The latter is going to be a pain as it's a Windows laptop, but I'll try to see if there isn't something that I can find to do that without driving me insane in the configuration process. Anyway, the first thing I wanted to do was to check up on the backups that were happening on frosty, an iMac G3 server in my office.
I looked at the drive used for backups and noticed that it was 53% full! That didn't seem right, so I checked on things and sure enough, my script wasn't deleting the old backups, it was leaving them around. I spent a few minutes clearing out the old backups in the directory - keeping the last week as that's the rotation plan. Then I spent just a few minutes noticing why the script had failed (I copied it from my CVS backup script and it didn't have different users to deal with) and fixed it up so that it deletes the week-old backups right before it makes today's backups. Looking a lot better.
Next thing is to get the kids machines to mirror their accounts to frosty so that when the backups are done, they backup the mirror and we have duplicate redundancy in the system - the user accounts on frosty and the backups of the accounts on frosty. I like this plan a lot. At least until Leopard comes out, and then with Time Machine I'll have to re-think all this and get those backups going in whatever way Time Machine allows.
I've always been partial to the unix tools, and I've used rsync and rdist in the past so it seemed like a nice way to get the kids machines mirrored to frosty. I found a nice article that talks about setting up rsync on Mac OS X and walks through the configuration of the SSH key files, etc. This is nice because I haven't generated key files in years, and it's always something I have to go back to the man pages on to get right. This makes it much more convenient.
In the article, there's a reference to using launchd to automate backups when attaching an external drive. I'm not so sure I need that, but it's an excellent use of launchd and I just might find a use for it someday. No, I think it'll be easy enough to just cron the backup script on the kids' laptops so that they kick off in the early evening and mirror themselves to frosty. With rsync only the changes are going to get sent, and that'll save a lot of work as most of the files on the kids machines are not going to change that much, and so the bandwidth on the wireless network will be minimal. I still like the full backups of the accounts on frosty, but that's a drive hanging off the machine - no big deal.
So, this weekend I'll spend some time getting the rsync scripts on the kids laptops going and make sure they work. I'll also put the same kind of backup script for all user accounts on squirt, the Mac Mini that everyone seems to use from time to time. That'll make sure that we don't loose anything from that guy, either. It's a good plan. I'm excited about it, and it'll be really nice to get it all going.