simple free backup software?

[mcveigh]

I was helping a friend yesterday and she uses an external hard drive with time machine...between two Macs. She hooks it up to one at a time to do backups.

Of course she often will go a week or month in between backups. I showed her dropbox for her files but she doesn't want to change where she keeps files. She didn't like the idea of a service like carbonite either.:'(

I was hoping there might be a simple piece of software that could copy one folder to another folder (her dropbox folder) on a daily basis. That way her essential work was off the Mac incase it died or something.

 

[Blackjack200]

I don't understand, why doesn't she just plug the HDD into her router? That's the way TM was designed to be used, that way any time you're on WiFi, you're backing up.

I was also under the impression that you could use any mounted drive, including dropbox, as a target for TM, but I could be wrong about that.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

She doesn't like Carbonite, huh? Foolish.

But a Mac is basically FreeBSD on acid, so you can set up a crontab to copy her Documents/Desktop/Photos/etc. directories to her Dropbox folder.

You could even zip them up to save space in Dropbox.

http://ole.michelsen.dk/blog/schedule-jobs-with-crontab-on-osx-yosemite.html

+

#!/bin/bash
for DIR in `Documents Desktop Photos`
do
    zip -r ~/Dropbox/${DIR}.zip ~/${DIR}
done

(I may be missing some zip syntax here, since I'm not in front of my Mac to trial-and-error.

 

[KeithP]

There is no reason to swap back and forth like that. Just attached the drive to one of the Macs and share it. Time Machine on the other Mac will be able to backup to the drive over the network.

-KeithP

 

[Rakehellion]

There is no reason to swap back and forth like that. Just attached the drive to one of the Macs and share it. Time Machine on the other Mac will be able to backup to the drive over the network.

-KeithP

This. There's no reason to disconnect your Time Machine drive.

SpiderOak is like Dropbox except it can backup any folder.

 

[Jeff7181]

This. There's no reason to disconnect your Time Machine drive.

SpiderOak is like Dropbox except it can backup any folder.

And it's more secure. And you can use a local repository on your LAN for speedy restores. And it can back up UNC paths for data not stored locally on the machine on which the application is running. And it tracks file versions. And it uses deduplication and passes space savings from said deduplication along to the user.

 

[Kaido]

But a Mac is basically FreeBSD on acid

QFP because it made me lol 😀

 

[mcveigh]

Thanks everyone. SHe has a Macbook and a Macbook Air. there isn't one she can just leave the hard drive plugged into. I don't know what kind of router she has, so I don't know if it has a USB port and can share a volume.

I'll have to check out spider oak.

thanks!