[csonni]

Is there any particular backing up scheme that you use in OSX? How do I know where my addresses and mail is for Entourage and Mail.app? What about backing up databases from certain applications- where do you normally find them? What do you think of SilverKeeper by Lacie? I've used it in OS9 and it works well- simple compared to Retrospect! And, it's free.

 

[monokitty]

Your email is saved in your users folder under your username. When you plan to backup, back up your entire user folder to make sure you don't loose any of your email, addresses, other documents, etc

 

[MacGenius]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by csonni:
Is there any particular backing up scheme that you use in OSX? How do I know where my addresses and mail is for Entourage and Mail.app? What about backing up databases from certain applications- where do you normally find them? What do you think of SilverKeeper by Lacie? I've used it in OS9 and it works well- simple compared to Retrospect! And, it's free.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

The only product I've been satisfied with over the years is Retrospect. I've tried them all and we rely on it for our backup systems (4 Linux, 1 Windows 2000, and multiple OS X systems). We've had some drives crash and we've never had any problems with Retrospect. Very reliable.

Now as for OS X your "account" information is stored in your User folder. If you back that up by whatever means you deem then you are mostly safe. Keep in mind however that if you do use the BSD portion then there are quite anumber of hidden ". files" that are ignored by the Finder so I don't recommend using the Finder to do reliable backups. Its only about 90% effective.

As for Mail settings and emails, those are located in your Library folder in your user folder in a folder called Mail. Entourage stores your mail and settings in your Documents folder in a folder called Microsoft user Data. Back those up and your mail is safe.

Think of your Library fodler in your user folder as a "virtual system folder" to use Mac OS 9 speak. All native OS programs store their settings in there because they are multi-user aware. Is Mac OS 9 everything (except for Quark settings) were dumped in the global Preferences folder. Since OS is a true multi-user system they had to find a way to preserve this type of behaviour but keep user data segregated from other users. The Library is a "dumping" ground for support files and preferences.

 

[dthompson101]

the quickest and easiest way to ensure that you are backing up everything that you need is to use the "ditto" command. Get yourself a cheap firewire drive and you can run this command in the terminal, and just like macgenious said, you will get that other 10% of invisible files and folders. It also retains all your permissions, ownerships, and groups on your files and folders. On top of that, it also copies the resourses in the files so that your Mac knows what to do with a file when you try to open it.

This is all done from the terminal:
sudo ditto -rsrc /Users/username /Volumes/firewiredrive/username

After that you can tar the folder or zip or gzip it. Whichever you prefer to compress and archive your files to. This is the basic way in which many admins backup thier systems. They issue commands (usually tar combined with gzip) and back the system up to another hard drive or tape device.

With retrospect, I agree that it's a good system, however it has some major limits in my opinion as having to do with permissions and ownerships when you have to unarchive stored data in Mac OS X. Hopefully it will get more productive as they keep developing for it...

Anywho, just another method of backing up your stuff.