Otherwise I have not experienced any problems with rsync and resource forks.

I have the automated rsync backups take care of my Users/ every hour and cpio -pdl every day, week, month and year.

The boot volume I snap shot after major upgrades or application installs. (a few times a year.)

This way I get a bootable image that may only need a few fink packages, or applications installed, and my data is backed up every hour with regular periodic snapshots.

Now that my new Mac Mini arrived, I am facing the age-old problem of synchronizing information across multiple machines. I have a lot of transient information (addresses, mail, bookmarks, etc.) on my PowerBook that will need to be synchronized with…

1. It has incremental backups, so you can go back in time in a much more sophisticated way than picking the older of drives 1 or 2. Handy if you don’t discover for a week that you corrupted some essential file.

2. It handles resource forks, starting with the 0.13 series. I just got bitten by Quicken – it stores significant data in the resource fork. If you restore Quicken files from an rsynced copy, it will say “Unable to load file”. I had to do some voodoo to recover any data from them at all. I was lucky that I used the backup only a few days after starting to use Quicken. If I had more data, that would have really sucked.

The good news is that the backup that ran earl…

Here’s the Mac OS X Hints story on it.

Honestly, I can’t think of any document types that I really care about that would be affected… text files and JPEGs for the most part. Perhaps I’m forgetting something important?

And you don’t have to learn anything new, just use the path to rsyncX’s version of rsync.

Have you actually tried to boot from one of your backups?

One crucial difference between rsync and rsyncx is that rsync is _not_ aware of the differences between the HFS+ filesystem and the typical unix filesystems (UFS, ext2, etc.) RsyncX is — although it has other problems. As you mentioned, rsync therefore doesn’t copy some of the metadata which Mac users expect. More importantly, however, it does not copy file resource fork of any file — only the data fork.

The last time I checked, OS X would not boot from a disc whose files had lost all resource forks. This may have changed, and Apple is definitely moving away from them. But this doesn’t solve the problem of old files. For example, in older Microsoft Word documents created on the Mac, the document was entirely stored in the resource fork and it was the data fork that was superfluous. Turbotax apparently still depends on it. (see this link)

There are two “solutions” that I know of with which one can retain both folks and use rsync for backing up. One is to use the disk image facilities to create an image, need not require a resource fork. The other is rather ugly: back up to an SMB server (which puts the resource fork data files that are named dot, understore, the normal filename and then rsync _that_ file tree somewhere else. The disk images can be restored to a bootable volume, but the SMB server method does not easily result in a bootable volume — it merely preserves all of the data.

One of my hopes for Tiger is that the rumors that Apple will support a version of rsync that transparently handles multiple fork files in it pan out.

Regular rsync uses SSH too, the only difference (as far as I can tell) betwee RsyncX and rsync is that RsyncX preserves Mac OS 9 file meta data. Plus normal rsync is standard on the OS so you don’t need to worry about it being overwritten.

I think you can do something like this to have it mail you the log file:

/usr/bin/uuencode /path/to/filename.log filename.log > /path/to/filename.log.uu
/usr/bin/mail -s "CRON log" username@example.com < /path/to/filename.log.uu

I have a configuration similar to yours — using my powerbook to back up to my g4/400 using RsyncX nightly. One experience I’ve had is that because rsync runs autonomously in the background, it is possible that something konks out but you not be aware about it until too late. I had a situation where I performed a system update on my server and it overwrote rsyncx so my powerbook rsyncx was… well…. not rsyncing. I caught it about 3 weeks after it happened and thankfully it was just a check I was doing, not a need I had. but it underscored the importance that the system alert you when something doesn’t work.

I still have to work on more elegant solution but basically I log all my rsyncs to a rysnc log file that I can view in console. the rsync command looks something like this:

date >> ~/Library/Logs/rsync.log; time /usr/local/bin/rsync -av -z –eahfs –exclude-from=”/~/backupExclude.txt” -e ssh “~/Documents” “~/Pictures/iPhoto Library” “~/Library” “user@serverIP:path/to/backup” >> ~/Library/Logs/rsync.log

the –exclude-from= switch is a text file containing patterns to not backup… (eg cache files, itunes stuff. etc.

I still want it to email me on failure or something… but I will fuddle around with it.

Also — I understand what you said about the rsyncx front end… why bother — the command line with the man pages is much less confusing.

The other thing I like about rsyncx is that it does this though ssh. this means that you can backup your powerbook anywhere in the world, so long as you have the domainname/IP of your server (and ssh is turned on)

Scott