![]() ![]() Rsync -a -exclude Parallels/ ~/Documents/ /Volumes/backup/DocumentsĪnother option that you might need is when you use a FAT-32 formatted drive. If you have a large virtual machine, this could easily take 15 minutes. A good example of this is the virtual machine files Parallels makes in the /Documents/ directory and which can be quite large and will be backed up every time. You might also want to exclude a few sub-directories or files with the backup. ![]() Rsync -a -progress ~/Documents/ /Volumes/backup/Documents ![]() If you want to get a little more feedback on what rsync is actually doing you can add a few more options to let it output a little more to the screen: If you wouldn’t do that, and you forgot the slash after ~/Documents rsync would create a directory named ‘Documents’ in the /Volumes/backup/Documents directory, so your files would eventually be backed up under This is also true for DMG files and CDs and DVDs you load.Īn important thing to remember is that you should always include a trailing slash (/) after the SOURCE directory and no slash after the DESTINATION. The /Volumes/ path always leads to your drives under Mac OS X. Rsync -a /Users/alice/Documents/ /Volumes/backup/Documents In essence you could write the statement above also as If, for example, your name would be ‘Alice’ your home directory would probably be Rsync -a ~/Documents/ /Volumes/backup/Documentsįor those of you who don’t use the Terminal very often: the tilde (~) is a shortcut for your home directory. So, let’s say you want to backup the files in your Documents directory to your external harddrive, which you appropriately named ‘backup’, then this would be the command: Ha, just kidding! Fortunately there is another switch that does all of that with one switch, namely the archive switch: To do that simply use this easy-to-remember option list: Aside from that you’ll want to include all subdirectories, links, permissions, date/time, groups, owner and devices. What you’ll probably want is a one-way transfer of all files in SOURCE to DESTINATION, where only files are copied that are not available on the DESTINATION disk or different. ![]() You’ll get an overview of all possible options. Try running it by opening up the Terminal.app (located in your Applications/Utilities folder) and running the command: rsync is reliable, fast, and easily configurable. It originated from the UNIX/Linux world, where it has been part of most Linux distributions for many years. Rsync is a command-line utility shipped with every copy of Mac OS X. Luckily, there is a very good (free) alternative to Time Machine that does exactly what i want with backups: it lets you specify which folders you want to backup, it doesn’t delete things on the backup drive when you delete files from your original drive, and it’s compatible with any external drive and can even backup files over a network. When i want to play a certain MP3 file from my external drive i now have to ‘restore’ and ‘look back in history’ to find it. What happens when the next backup round is happening? Exactly, the 5GB of files get deleted from the external disk as well. Let’s say i have 10GB of MP3 files, which i backup with Time Machine, then i remove about 5GB of files from my MacBook to free some space. My MacBook drive is only 80GB big, so i can never have the complete contents of my external drive on my MacBook. I have an external drive with about 300G of files, including lots of music and video files.
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