[freebsd-questions] Sorta OT - Backup solutions Mac to FreeBSD

[Howard Jones]

Gable Barber wrote:
> Hello all,
> I have been poking around the 'Net a bit looking for an easy to use
> backup solution for our Mac's (1 mini, 1 powerbook, more in the
> future).
>
> Basically there is a server, offsite (FBSD 6.2) with 2 RAID 5 arrays.
> I would like to be able to set the 2 (for now) clients to
> automatically, incrementally backup certain directories, nightly.
> Something encrypted would be nice aswell.
>
You might like to try duplicity or rdiff-backup. Both are python-based 
incremental backup solutions, that can work over encrypted connections. 
duplicity can also encrypt the backed-up data for untrusted central 
sites, while rdiff-backup has the advantage that the backup is a normal 
mirror of the backed-up machine (plus reverse increments), so you can 
pick though it. duplicity is initiated from the client over 
FTP/SCP/DAV/S3, while rdiff-backup is initiated by the server normally 
using SSH.

I've been using rdiff-backup on a few dozen FreeBSD servers for a year 
or so now.  I've not tried them on my macs yet but I don't see a reason 
why it *wouldn't* work - python tends to be pretty portable. I'll try it 
on the macs this weekend, in fact.

Howie