Here’s how I backup my current home directory on the Mac Mini onto an external USB harddisk using rsync.
`rsync --archive --verbose --delete --delete-excluded --exclude=/Library/Caches --exclude=/.Trash "/Users/alex/" "/Volumes/Media Backup/Alex Pyrobombus"`
For my laptop:
`rsync --archive --copy-unsafe-links --verbose --delete --delete-excluded --exclude=/Library/Caches --exclude=/apache2 --exclude=/.Trash "/Users/alex/" "/Volumes/Media Backup/Alex Alpinobombus"`
I don’t have any music on my laptop... ;) I’m excluding apache2 because that is a symlink to `/usr/local/apache2` and this causes a chgrp error when running rsync. I use `--copy-unsafe-links` because some of the links in `Library/NeoOfficeJ-1.1` point outside of my home directory.
That reminds me, by the way, that I need to buy a second enclosure for the second internal 120G IDE drive I have left-over from my old Confusibombus machine. The old dead and empty hull is all that remains of my self-assembled Pentium 4 SlackWare. BumbleBees don’t last forever...
While backing up, I noticed that my use of the CPAN shell was wrong, and I reran `o conf init` and used “sudo make“ and “sudo ./Build” instead of the defaults. Now I can run the CPAN shell directly without sudo, and it will sudo when installing. That (hopefully) means that my .cpan/build and .cpan/sources will have the correct ownerships: alex instead of root. ;)
For Claudia’s account, we also need to backup the DVD stuff. The DVD stuff has no space on the system disk. So we have a disk called “Extern” for DVD stuff.
1. `/Users/Claudia` → `/Volumes/Claudias Backup/Claudia Pyrobombus`
2. `/Volumes/Extern/DVD` → `/Volumes/Claudias Backup/DVD`
Here we go:
`rsync --archive --copy-unsafe-links --verbose --delete --delete-excluded --exclude=/Library/Caches --exclude=/.Trash "/Users/claudia/" "/Volumes/Claudias Backup/Claudia Pyrobombus"`
`rsync --archive --copy-unsafe-links --verbose --delete --delete-excluded --exclude=/.Trash "/Volumes/Extern/DVD/" "/Volumes/Claudias Backup/DVD"`
#Backup #Software