Creating a Bootable Backup Copy of Your System Drive
Updated 18 June 2003
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PsyncWe’ve confirmed that psync as outlined below works just fine under Jaguar. |
There are a couple of different ways of doing this. Some are much harder than others. By far the easiest I have found is to use a little perl script written precisely for this purpose.
You can install it from the web, but it is much easier to let perl work its magic. So go to the command line.
sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell
and then when you get the cpan> prompt
install MacOSX::File
Let this run for a bit. When this is done,
quit
and then you can either get a man page on psync by
man psync
or just run the program
psync / /Volumes/BackupDrive
This takes the contents of the root drive “/” and copies to a drive of your choice a the path “/Volumes/BackupDrive” or wherever is appropriate for you. This will not delete the contents of the backup drive. If you want to do that use.
psync -d / /Volumes/BackupDrive
You can cron this job for an automated backup. Again, this creates a fully bootable OS on another drive that is exactly like what you already have.
If you want to use this for remote backups to an AppleShare server, for example, you can use the -r flag.
psync -r -d / /Volumes/AppleShareDrive
18 June 2003: Astute reader Dan Phillips pointed out that psync now has a GUI, availalbe from http://sourceforge.net/projects/psyncx/.