Back up OS X to a Windows machine on the network
I know there are plenty of back up/synchronization packages for the Mac, and I know Time Machine is awesome. But as I have a Linux/FreeBSD background, I wanted to do it my way. And none of the software I tried was able to do it my way 
. So the command line seemed to be a good solution.
My office Windows machine has plenty of disk space on it, and it is rarely used. It was an ideal system (with not so ideal a file system) to do backups on. The solution I came up with requires:
- A shared folder on the PC, mounted on the Mac.
- The Unix app rdiff-backup, available via MacPorts.
- Notifications are sent using growlnotify, part of the Growl notification system.
The final step was to write a custom shell script to back up my Mac to the mounted Windows shared folder; here’s what that looks like:
#!/bin/bash
# my backup script in /Users/mkljun/backup.sh
DestinationIP="148.88.226.250"
SourceIP=`ifconfig | sed -n '/en0/,/media/p' | grep -v inet6 | grep inet | awk '{print $2}'`
LOGFILE="/Users/mkljun/backup.log"
SourceDir="/Users/mkljun"
DestinationDir="/Volumes/mkljunHome/BackupMac"
SambaDrive="smb://mkljun@MKLJUNDESKTOP/mkljunHome"
## delete a log file if bigger than 50M
# check if the file exists otherwise create it
if [ ! -f $LOGFILE ]; then `touch $LOGFILE`; fi
LOGSIZE=`ls -l $LOGFILE | awk '{print $5}'`
echo "Size of $LOGFILE = $LOGSIZE bytes." >> $LOGFILE 2>&1
if [ $LOGSIZE -gt 50000000 ]; then rm $LOGFILE; fi
echo "************************************************************" >> $LOGFILE 2>&1
date >> $LOGFILE 2>&1
echo "************************************************************" >> $LOGFILE 2>&1
echo "Pinging destination machine $DestinationIP:" >> $LOGFILE 2>&1
# ping destination (backup) ip address; output redirected to a log file
ping -c 1 $DestinationIP >> $LOGFILE 2>&1
# check if ping successful
if [ $? != 0 ]
then
# if ping command not successful, print notification (echo should be in one line!!)
echo "-t 'Backup failed' -m 'Your IP is $SourceIP. Backup PC $DestinationIP could not be reached'" | xargs /usr/local/bin/growlnotify
echo "Pinging failed" >> $LOGFILE 2>&1
else
# mount samba drive (it should be one line)
osascript -e "try" -e "mount volume \"$SambaDrive\"" -e "end try" > /dev/null 2<&1
# check if mount was successful
if [ $? == 0 ]; then
# this echo should be in one line with a pipe
echo "-t 'Backup' -m 'Your IP is $SourceIP. Starting backing up now'" | xargs /usr/local/bin/growlnotify
echo "Backing up" >> $LOGFILE 2>&1
rdiff-backup $SourceDir $DestinationDir >> $LOGFILE 2>&1
# if rdiff-backup
if [ $? == 0 ]; then
echo "-t 'Backup' -m 'Backup completed successfully'" | xargs /usr/local/bin/growlnotify
echo "Backup completed successfully" >> $LOGFILE 2>&1
else
echo "-t 'Backup failed' -m 'Something was wrong'" | xargs /usr/local/bin/growlnotify
echo "Backup failed" >> $LOGFILE 2>&1
fi
# delete all backups older than 2 weeks
rdiff-backup --remove-older-than 2W $DestinationDir >> $LOGFILE 2>&1
fi
fi
You can read the entire tutorial on my blog, and download the latest version of the script.
Source: MacOSXHints
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