It’s 2:30am, and I have got to give a shout-out to PsyncX. My OS X installation went all crazy this afternoon, a result of some overlapping files, including a dozen core system files. (Which resulted, no doubt, from yanking out the power cord mid-boot after an incident involving a dishwasher, a moderately sized man-made lightning bolt in the living room, and the circuit breaker.) I flailed around for a couple of hours this evening, trying to debug things, unwilling to resort to restoring from my last backup from two weeks ago.
Little did I know that I’d configured PsyncX to perform nightly backups. I got up at 4am on Black Friday, shamefully, to buy a 200GB hard drive for $29. I installed it that day, created a Backup partition, and set up PsyncX and, though I’d forgotten, instructed it to back up my entire hard drive at 3am each night. When I finally realized this, I simply booted off of the duplicated hard drive and ran PsyncX in reverse, restoring yesterday’s backup of the System and Library folders. I rebooted and, easy as could be, my system was restored to its previous state.
I guess I’ve finally learned, after two decades of periodically losing massive amounts of data due to lack of backups. Go me.
Waldo wrote:
Okay… tell.. where did you get a 29 dollar 2oogb hard drive??
Wow, that looks like a great little program. It would certainly make my life easier if it does what you and the developer say it will do. I am rather surprised though that I have not seen it mentioned before, either here or elsewhere.
where did you get a 29 dollar 2oogb hard drive??
Staples. I also got a 512MB CF card for $15 and a 512MB USB memory stick for $10.
Wow, that looks like a great little program.
It’s just a frontend to rsync, a long-time staple of the computer world. But rsync is a bear to work with for first-timers (like cron or RegEx), making programs like this are really helpful.
More witchcraft.