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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Software Apple

BRU LE for Mac OS X 56

Posted by Cliff from the backups-for-powerbooks dept.
GraWil wonders: "The Tolis Group has just released BRU LE for Mac OS X. It is far more reasonably priced than the professional version but it is still priced well above the personal edition for Linux and BSD users. Does anyone have experience they can share about strategies for backing up Powerbook and Desktop Mac I am using a total of 140GB of the 180GB available)?"
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BRU LE for Mac OS X More

BRU LE for Mac OS X

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  • WTF? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Curtman ( 556920 ) on Sunday February 29, 2004 @11:07AM (#8422397)
    Damn I thought that said Bruce Lee [c64unlimited.net]
    • Damn I thought that said Bruce Lee

      I read "creme brulee". I'm a nerd but I cook, too. Hence that.

  • Why would I use this over Dantz Retrospect? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 29, 2004 @12:02PM (#8422692)
    $99 PER CLIENT?? I thought Retrospect's pricing was awful, but these guys really take the cake. For $99 I could buy every machine on the network a second hard drive and just clone to it.

    This product doesn't even support the APPLE superdrive, for pete's sake.

    • Re:Why would I use this over Dantz Retrospect? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yeah, I checked this out about a month ago as an alternative to Retrospect, but it appears to be far less versatile and far more complicated to set up.

      I didn't even look at the pricing, but shit, $99 per client makes Dantz's prices look reasonable, you got that right.

    • Re:Why would I use this over Dantz Retrospect? (Score:5, Informative)

      by yummyporkproducts ( 577076 ) on Sunday February 29, 2004 @03:12PM (#8423722)
      Because retrospect is a worthless piece of shit. We struggled with it for years, because it was the only backup option that supported tape on OS X. It had a problem with just not running on schedule, quitting mid-backup, and others. Retrospect doesn't even support the APPLE Xserve RAID, for pete's sake (or didn't until the latest version, 6, which is a paid upgrade for a product that never worked well in the first place). BRU works well - we've found that it backups and restores reliably, and we can script it from the command line.

      • Re:Why would I use this over Dantz Retrospect? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by FredFnord ( 635797 ) on Sunday February 29, 2004 @03:36PM (#8423840)
        I don't know what product YOU used, but I have used Retrospect to back up:

        1) My five computer home network
        2) A 25-Mac-and-8-PC development network
        3) A network of about 100 computers, mixed Mac and PC

        At various times, with various versions. Perhaps you used someone's personal machine which was off 2/3 of the time or whatever, but installed on a server (on a beige G3 web server, a Quadra 700 (in 1998!), and a Mac IIci (in 1994) respectively) it always worked just fine for me. Especially compared to what I'm trying to get to work now, a Computer Associates piece of junk Windows app with a lousy UI which only appears to send email notifications of missed backups when IT wants to.

        Maybe you should consider a different career, if you really had that much trouble with Retrospect.

        -fred
        • I'm glad to hear that it worked for you, Fred. But complete incompatibility with fibre channel storage was an acknowledged by Dantz, prior to 6.0, which was released a few weeks ago. Incomplete backups and incompatibilites with a variety of scsi cards were also 'known issues'.

          installed on a server (on a beige G3 web server, a Quadra 700 (in 1998!), and a Mac IIci (in 1994) respectively) it always worked just fine for me.

          Golly, it sounds like you're really on the cutting edge there man.

          Maybe you should c


        • Fred: you might grab a clue. It's really great that you got it working with a Beige G3 in 1998, but the parent poster specifically mentioned Apple's Xserve RAID. Did you know, for instance, that until this very latest version of Retrospect, that it couldn't work with 1TB volumes?

          Depending on how you set up your RAID, that would make it incompatible with the Xserve RAID on that issue alone. If you had signed that PO, I guess it'd be you that'd be looking for another career, and for the justifiable offense of talking out your ass.
      • Bullshit. I've used Retrosect since OS8 - it's worked perfectly on DC200s, DATs and now external drives. It's idiot-simple to use too, which says much more about your abilities than its.

  • Context!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by samael ( 12612 ) <Andrew@Ducker.org.uk> on Sunday February 29, 2004 @12:25PM (#8422823) Homepage
    Aah, yes, BRU LE, that fantastic program which......

  • another slow apple news day... (Score:3, Informative)

    by sleepypants ( 599905 ) on Sunday February 29, 2004 @12:27PM (#8422835)
    External HD is the way to go...especially if you have a new-ish mac, you can go either USB 2.0 or IEEE1394. I broke apart the case of my 1394 external HD to plug in various hard drives I had lying around. Not pretty, but works for me...

  • Compression (Score:4, Funny)

    by addaon ( 41825 ) <(addaon+slashdot) (at) (gmail.com)> on Sunday February 29, 2004 @12:31PM (#8422854)
    You can save space by removing punction, such as '.', arbitrarily. You can also save storing a bit if you just don't capitalize stuff. These savings are offset, though, my scattering random characters such as ')' through your files... It's a tradeoff.

  • Just one question... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Intellectual Elitist ( 706889 ) on Sunday February 29, 2004 @12:38PM (#8422892)
    So where's the companion program "CRE ME"?

  • Rsync (Score:4, Informative)

    by reconbot ( 456259 ) * <wizard.roborooter@com> on Sunday February 29, 2004 @02:18PM (#8423439) Homepage Journal
    Its free, its pretty simple, and it works fast.

    Try this out for size.

    sudo rsync -v -a --progress --delete ~/ /Volumes/Yourbackupdrive/home/

    • Re:Rsync (Score:5, Informative)

      by Graff ( 532189 ) on Sunday February 29, 2004 @04:34PM (#8424184)
      Its free, its pretty simple, and it works fast.

      And it doesn't copy resource forks or Finder data so it can mangle copies on Mac OS X pretty easily...

      Don't use rsync on Mac OS X unless you don't mind possibly corrupting your files irreversibly. Instead you could either roll your own solution by doing copies with the ditto command, which has an option to preserve resource forks and metadata, or you can get RsyncX [macosxlabs.org], a rsync implementation that does handle these sort of issues correctly. You can learn a little more about copying and backing up files in this MacDevCenter article. [macdevcenter.com]

  • Backup on Mac OS X (Score:5, Insightful)

    by atomic-penguin ( 100835 ) <wolfe21@@@marshall...edu> on Sunday February 29, 2004 @02:38PM (#8423542) Homepage Journal
    Not trying to be a troll, just pointing out that OS X comes with perfectly good backup software.

    Tar and bzip2 come with Mac OS X, it wouldn't be that hard to script automated full and incremental backups. I do not believe that all OS X come with bash, however they at least come with tcsh. Here are a couple of simple examples.

    #!/bin/sh
    #example of full backup
    date > timestamp
    tar jcf home-full.tar.bz2 /home/

    #!/bin/sh
    #example of incremental backup
    lastbackup=`cat timestamp`
    date > timestamp
    tar jc --newer $lastbackup -f home-weekly.tar.bz2 /home/

    • Re:Backup on Mac OS X (Score:3, Informative)

      by norkakn ( 102380 )
      it comes with bash

      Welcome to Darwin!
      [Jonathan-Dobbies-Computer:~] jsdobbie% bash
      Jonathan-Dobbies-Computer:~ jsdobbie$ ps
      PID TT STAT TIME COMMAND
      573 std S 0:00.06 -tcsh
      581 std S 0:00.00 bash
      Jonathan-Dobbies-Computer:~ jsdobbie$

      it just isn't the default shell

      Jonathan-Dobbies-Computer:~ jsdobbie$ ls /bin/*sh /bin/bash /bin/sh /bin/zsh /bin/csh /bin/tcsh
      Jonathan-Dobbies-Computer:~ jsdobbie$

    • Re:Backup on Mac OS X (Score:3, Informative)

      by JJSpreij ( 84475 )
      I do not believe that all OS X come with bash

      both Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2) and Panther (Mac OS X 10.3) come with bash installed; and in Panther, it is the default shell.

      for a simple backup script, bash is not essential of course, though if you prefer it's easy to install in 10.1 or earlier. (Upgrading to 10.3 is an even beter idea ;-)

      Apple also offers its .Mac subscribers a backup program called... wait for it... Backup ! But that's more suited for simpler needs, probably doesn't support tape drives let

    • Re:Backup on Mac OS X (Score:3, Interesting)

      by burns210 ( 572621 )
      could be a very successful and simple freeware app to release. some nice gui for using tar, bzip2, and even rsync with the option of uploading to a ftp server somewhere.

    • Re:Backup on Mac OS X (Score:5, Informative)

      by Graff ( 532189 ) on Sunday February 29, 2004 @04:42PM (#8424231)
      As I mentioned in an earlier post [slashdot.org] be very careful with some of the copying/archiving utilities that come with Mac OS X. Many of them are not intended to copy Mac files, these utilities often strip metadata and resource forks and end up ruining files.

      Instead you need to use alternate tools included with Mac OS X such as ditto, CpMac, and hdiutil. There are also 3rd party utilities such as the tar replacement hfstar [metaobject.com] (located at the bottom of the page), and the rsync replacement RsyncX. [macosxlabs.org]

    • Re:Backup on Mac OS X (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Permission Denied ( 551645 ) on Sunday February 29, 2004 @05:47PM (#8424568) Journal
      1. MacOS X has come with bash since 10.0 in /bin/bash. It wasn't the default shell until 10.3.

      2. tar will not pick up HFS forks. Resource forks are somewhat more rare in Mac OS X, but they're still there and some programs won't work without them. Finder forks are everywhere in Mac OS X, and while they're not critical, Mac users refused to use a backup system I provided when it did not preserve finder forks.

      You can convert HFS resource forks into regular directories/files that will be picked up with tar/rsync/cpio/whatever. Resource forks can be accessed with the syntax "file/rsrc" or "file/..namedFork/rsrc". You can then copy the resource fork into a file called "._file" parallel to "file" and it will be preserved. This is how resource forks are handled on UFS, but it works on UFS and HFS.

      So you can do "mv file/..namedFork/rsrc ._file" to prepare file for backup by tar. Put it in a script with a "find" command and you can convert an entire filesystem. (Obviously, do your experimentation somewhere where you don't care if you break your file system.)

      Aliases are files with zero-length data forks and the alias information in the resource fork. If you preserve resource forks in one of the above manners, you preserve aliases. Otherwise, you just get regular empty files. I don't know how relevant this is for a backup/archival system as aliases usually break when you move them between systems due to differing volume IDs.

      Unfortunately, it's not possible to access the finder fork (creator, type) from the command line using standard utilities. If you want something that also preserves finder forks, it's possible to create, mount and manipulate HFS disk images (.dmg) from the command line using utilities supplied with Mac OS X. The commands you use are hdid, hdiutil and ditto. This is a PITA, but I just found someone who automated it: http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/apme/archive/ [kernelthread.com]

      Unfortunately, you can't access dmgs using standard utilities on other platforms, so this method is of limited usefulness. One of the main points of using tar (for me at least) is cross-platform compatibility: I need to access these files on non-Mac OS X systems (like a Solaris box or my NetBSD/SPARC machine, platforms that commercial vendors are unlikely to port to) but I would also prefer to have the metadata preserved when moving between Mac OS X systems. Other reasons to use tar are that (1) tar archives will remain accessible virtually forever due to their ubiquity (whereas an esoteric backup program probably won't have a version for OSes ten years in the future) and (2) tar comes standard with MacOS X, so your backup system will always work (whereas you may have to wait for your backup vendor to release a new version of their program for 10.4, 10.5, etc., assuming the company exists at that time, but if 10.4 introduces some incompatibility in a script I wrote, I can fix that myself in minutes), and the final reason for using standard command-line utilities is (3) flexibility: you can do anything from any kind of incremental schedule to simulating filesystem snapshots [mikerubel.org], selectively choosing which files to back up, how often and where and automating the entire process so it's completely transparent to your users.

      Back in the days of 10.0, I had a long list of problems with Mac OS X that kept me from using it as a serious Unix system. Some of these were relatively minor and esoteric problems that I doubt many others encountered. Amazingly, each one of these except one has been fixed by 10.3. The only remaining issue I have with Mac OS X is that I can't access finder forks using POSIX APIs. If someone could rectify this, that would be really nice :)

      • Re:Backup on Mac OS X (Score:3, Informative)

        by Hungus ( 585181 )
        HFStar [metaobject.com] will however pickup resource forks you can install it seperately or with fink [slashdot.org]. On the plus side the source is full available and it is of course GOL compliant.
    • Which things like Photoshop still write out with their files, and which tar gleefully ignores. Tar and Stuff a site directory: untar, you have a bunch of Safari-defaulted HTML and a bunch of Imageviewer JPEGs. Unstuff and you have Dreamweaver HTML and Photoshop and Fireworks JPEGS (which is damned useful for determining which have been optimized).

      Don't get me wrong, Tar is dandy- but not for resource-fork sensitive files and applications. Which is why I still do incremental DVD-R burns and have piles o

  • looking for good mac backup software (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 29, 2004 @03:16PM (#8423739)
    I've been trying to find good software for backing up the mac too..

    Retrospect Express works, and that's what I currently use, but it suffers from typical closed-source problems. They ported it to Mac OS X but didn't improve the interface which is still a little awkward. The whole architecture of the program is still geared around OS9 single-user. And it doesn't correctly archive Unicode filenames (I had a bunch on my hard drive and finally gave up and renamed them all english). It also only supports FTP for remote backups, not SFTP/SSH or rsync. Basically it seems "stuck" in its current feature set.

    BRU?? I tried installing that on my Linux machine a long time ago, it didn't come in any package and it littered the hard drive with "hidden license files" which had backspaces in the names to hide themselves. I don't know what it does on the Mac, but no thanks.

    I have a big RAID server where I back up all my Unix machines with rsync. What I really want is to back up my Mac the same way. But I'm not aware of any rsync that will correctly copy resource forks to a filesystem that doesn't use them natively.

    There is a Mac OS X rsync, but it only copies resource forks to other Macs, as far as I know. Not to a non-HFS filesystem.

    What I really really would love is an rsync that copies the resource forks to hidden files the same way the Mac copies them to non-HFS partitions already. So I could mount the backup directory via NFS and all the resource forks would be recognized.

    I have considered the option of mounting the backup dir via NFS, and using resource-fork-aware rsync locally to the NFS directory, but would rather do it over the network.

    Are there any rsync ports that do this??
    • Retrospect Express is designed to be limited. That's why they sell it so cheap. If you're willing to spend a couple hundred dollars you can get the workgroup upgrade, with five or ten clients. Works great for me.

      -fred

    • RSyncX for resource forks (Score:5, Informative)

      by JJSpreij ( 84475 ) on Sunday February 29, 2004 @03:41PM (#8423863)
      the default rsync included with OS X isn't aware of resource forks at all...

      RSyncX [macosxlabs.org] will copy resource forks, but only to another OS X system running RSyncX with a HFS(+) filesystem.

    • I hate to risk getting modded down by pointing out the flaws of open source advocacy, but I find it funny that your first complaint after the fact that it's closed source is that the interface is awkward. Maybe I'm way off, but for the most part it seems to me awkward interfaces are a staple of open source software. Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of "free" in all its incarnations, but opening source unfortunately doesn't (usually) mean the interface gets better.

  • Carbon Copy Cloner (Score:5, Informative)

    by SimonDorfman.com ( 697156 ) on Sunday February 29, 2004 @03:59PM (#8423979) Homepage
    Carbon Copy Cloner works very well. I just did a backup of my powerbook to an external firewire drive using CCC before sending the powerbook in for repair. Now I'm booting from the firewire drive on my old iMac until I get my powerbook back. Seemless. http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/ 13260M [versiontracker.com]

  • use psync (Score:5, Informative)

    by noisia ( 757477 ) on Sunday February 29, 2004 @06:25PM (#8424812)
    psync is a great, easy to use tool for backing up OS x. It copies resource forks, and makes a fully bootable copy of the hard disk. Easy to script it into your /etc/daily file as well. I believe that ccc is a front end to psync as well.

    not a shill, just a happy camper.

    http://www.dan.co.jp/cases/macosx/psync.html

  • Some other useful standard tools (Score:5, Informative)

    by rohanl ( 152781 ) on Sunday February 29, 2004 @11:04PM (#8426102)
    You might want to look at:
    /usr/bin/ditto
    copy files and directories to a destination directory
    /usr/sbin/asr
    Apple Software Restore

    Read the man pages for more info. Both these are standard in Mac OS X (Panther at least, not sure about older releases) and handle resource forks properly.

    asr is actually the command line backend that the Software Restore Disk that shipped with your computer uses.
  • BRU is one of the commonly-available utilities for various flavors of Unix. If it works for your other platforms, having your X boxes on it makes sense.

    Now, what's with all the Retrospect bashing? It works great for us and has been getting better every quarter or so. It's certainly a lot easier to use than most Unixy backup/recovery utilities, even under Linux and Solaris, which we use it with.

  • Amanda + HFStar (Score:4, Informative)

    by tim1724 ( 28482 ) * on Monday March 01, 2004 @06:52PM (#8434535) Homepage Journal
    At work I use amanda [amanda.org] and hfstar [metaobject.com] to back up my PowerMac G5 using our amanda backup server (which also handles our Solaris and Linux boxes). It works pretty well, although it takes some work to set up.

    If you've already got amanda set up for other machines, it's not too much work to add a Mac OS X box to your amanda setup.

    If you only have one machine which you want to back up, then amanda is overkill.
  • File Synchronizer X [softobe.com] does the job for me. I use it for a nightly incremental backup of two 250GB drives on my job server (OS X Server 10.2.6) to external firewire drives.

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