I finally got around to backing up my Time Capsule last weekend as I needed an offsite backup for it. While I have an offsite backup for my MacBook Pro, I didn't have an offsite backup for my Time Capsule which has my wife's backup on it as well as my own Time Machine backup. The AirPort utility has an option to archive the Time Capsule to a USB hard drive. There are 2 problems with this option; 1) it is all or nothing with no incremental option and 2) using it takes the Time Capsule off the network for the entire backup. When I did the backup (before I discovered #2), it took about 6 hours to backup.
So, using this option is obviously not geared towards people like me that want to do an offsite backup every week. I realize that I'm not the average user, but how hard would it have been to put an rsync-like feature so that incremental backups can be performed. So now I mount a backup drive on my media center machine and mount the Time Capsule volume; then I do an rsync and can do an incremental backup. Time Capsule stores backups as sparse disc images with bands that are about 8 MB, so the entire disc image "file" doesn't have to get backed up.
This is not as easy as it could be, but now I'll be able to store a backup offsite on a weekly basis.
Comments
January 2nd, 2011
Dan
Hey would you be willing to share the rsync command you used for this? I want to do the same thing (automate an off-site backup of our Time Capsule) but am nervous that with the wrong settings rsync might not handle the symlinks correctly, etc. Have you confirmed the backup works?
Totally agree the the built-in “archive” command is pretty useless. It’s also annoying that there’s no option to erase the drive you’re archiving onto, so once that fills up you have to plug it into a computer, erase it, then plug it into TC, then 24 hours of TC downtime. Honestly just dragging all the files across the network to make the backup is probably easier (though not sure what happens if a TM backup happens while that’s in progress, or for that matter while an rsync is in progress).
January 2nd, 2011
Scott Gruby
I actually stopped using rsync pretty much for what you mentioned about a backup in progress. In addition, it was far too slow. What I do now is mount the sparse image and use SuperDuper! to back it up to an external drive connected to my media center. This prevents Time Machine from being able to backup, is more reliable, and faster. However, I only backup the Time Machine backup of my wife’s machine as the SuperDuper! backups of Time Machine for my own machine were taking far too long. Since do daily backups with SuperDuper! on my primary machine, I’m not concerned. I use Time Machine on my machine in case I mess up and I can rollback, not as a primary backup.
One thing still missing in my routine is backing up to another media. When I get my next machine, I hope it will either come with a dual layer DVD burner or have an external one; 8 GB will make it easier to backup to DVDs periodically.
January 8th, 2011
Dan
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll try SuperDuper!