Article:		Automated Backups with Existing Tools
Subject:		ASR vs. CCC
Date:		2004-02-11 01:34:04
From:		peterhickman
Response to: ASR vs. CCC
You are correct that Carbon Copy Cloner allows scheduling, that is an error on my behalf. Indeed CCC is a great tool and is very adaptable. However one of my requirements was for several generations of backups so that I could restore to a previous state. I never worked out how to get this to work with CCC but my script did what I wanted. Being a programmer I must confess to coding up my own solution to a problem rather than looking for pre-existing solutions.

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• ASR vs. CCC
  2004-02-12 08:23:28  kelleherk [Reply | View]
  
  
  In fact, when you set up a schedule in CCC, it actually creates a full custom shell script and adds a cron task to the system crontab to execute it. So the CCC program itself does not actually open and run ... it has just automatically created a sophisticated synchronize shell script (which you can customize yourself if you are a programmer).
  The nice thing is that with the pysnc functionality enabled in the preferences, the backup is super quick. I have an external 60GB Firewire drive on my desk at home. Each night when I get home I just plug the FW drive into my powerbook (also with 60GB drive) and at midnight, the CCC backup script runs.
  I have about 45GB used on my drive and the whole backup task which insludes permissions repair and syncing the changes to the backup drive takes about 18 minutes every night usually.
  The only drawback is not having incremental restore points. But, for me having a backup clone of my drive lets me not worry about Powerbook theft, field damage, hard drive failure, major upgrades, trying a hack on the OS, etc.
  Try CCC .. it's great and free! ... all you need is a FW drive the same size as your internal drive.