rsync in OS X

Recently, I purchased a 1TB 2.5″ SSD drive.  The problem I was having was that I was worrying about the drive getting bumped and possibly losing data. Although I use Crashplan for long term archive, I like to back up my data on something local to ensure I can access it in a pinch or be able to seed the data and only restore the changes.

What I decided to use:

Standards based rsync built into OS X (Soon to be macOS )

Hazel

The hard drive contained a dmg file that is encrypted (500GB with the remaining 500GB unencrypted).  When I connect the drive, it mounts the non-encrypted volume.  I then double click on the dmg file where it prompts me for a password.  Once entered, it mounts a second volume on the Mac.

Hazel is looking out for a volume named ’The-Vault’.  Once it sees that volume mounted, it will launch the rsync “script”

rsync -rlptgoD /Volumes/Customer\ Files/ /Volumes/The-Vault/ClientBackup/

I added a Growl message just to keep me company 🙂

The ‘rsync’ calls the actual program.

-r, –recursive recurse into directories
-i, –itemize-changes output a change-summary for all updates
-p, –perms preserve permissions
-t, –times preserve times
-g, –group preserve group
-o, –owner preserve owner (super-user only)
-D same as –devices –specials
–devices preserve device files (super-user only)
–specials preserve special files

What this does in english:

Copies all files from /Volumes/Customer Files that are not already in ?Volumes/The-Vault/ClientBackup.  It will keep the date, time and permission that the original files had.

This runs once, when the volume is mounted.