Article:		Automated Backups with Existing Tools
Subject:		How about this?
Date:		2004-02-12 05:41:37
From:		rspeed
I would absolutely love to see something like this that uses CVS instead of disk images. It would be a whole lot more space efficient and it would be much easier to see when changes were made. It seems like it would be a near-perfect use of the technology.

Showing messages 1 through 1 of 1.

• How about this?
  2004-02-12 20:51:53  jslabovitz [Reply | View]
  
  
  CVS is problematic since it doesn't retain any sort of metadata (eg, resource forks, Finder info, etc.), nor does it work well with binary files at all.
  
  The "Subversion" system might work better; I don't know.
  
  I've been using rdiff-backup. It's a Python program wrapped around the librsync library, which enables incremental backups, optionally networked via ssh. The nice thing is that the backup location always has the full version of the current file; older revisions are stored as diffs. Rdiff-backup works great with binary files, and recent versions even handle all the Mac metadata.
  
  Unfortunately, there's no GUI for rdiff-backup. CCC is definitely easier to use. Personally, I use both: CCC for an emergency, gotta-get-working-NOW backup, and rdiff-backup for long-term, incremental backups.
  
  --John Labovitz