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I have two external hard drives, WD 320GB and a WD 1TB.

I would like to backup my WD 320GB on a regular basis. Please could you inform me of a good application which could provide these needs:

  • Backup compression (not just copy and pasting the files)
  • Support for FAT-32
  • Possibly scheduling

The external hard drives are in a FAT-32 format because they are sometimes used on a windows computer.

I have used Get Backup and it doesn't seem to work, as it has an error about copying files with the same name but different extensions

Thanks

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  • Have you considered making them HFS+ and using a tool like MacDrive on windows?
    – nuc
    Commented Apr 15, 2011 at 18:05
  • No I haven't. I use them sometimes at college, so I'm limited to what I can install. The drives have to be both windows and Mac compatible.
    – ryryan
    Commented Apr 15, 2011 at 18:09
  • NTFS is both windows and mac compatible with NTFS-3G, and also supports rsync which I would recommend.
    – ConstantineK
    Commented Apr 15, 2011 at 18:14
  • What sort of files (text, compressed audio, whole system, etc.) are you dealing with?
    – boehj
    Commented Apr 15, 2011 at 18:14
  • Ok, thanks. Anything and everything. Everything I download and anything personal to me is stored on the 320GB.
    – ryryan
    Commented Apr 15, 2011 at 18:27

2 Answers 2

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Have you tried Xupport?

Xupport is a multipurpose system utility for Mac OS X. It provides many features to configure hidden Mac OS X and Unix options, to increase system security and performance, to maintain and backup Mac OS X, and to dig deeper into the world of Unix. Xupport 3 is fully compatible with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), 10.5 (Leopard) and 10.6 (Snow Leopard), and is available as Universal Application for PowerPC and Intel Macs.

Available here

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  • +1 for a cool app I haven't seen before, it reminds me of old school windows programs where one guy wrote like 20 different programs and put them all in one interface.
    – ConstantineK
    Commented Apr 15, 2011 at 21:30
  • Functionality, over form any day...
    – Robert
    Commented Apr 15, 2011 at 21:34
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    The mac way, right :D
    – ConstantineK
    Commented Apr 15, 2011 at 22:21
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How comfortable are you with working with command line tools?

Because honestly rsync and launchd working together is all you need to make this happen, both preinstalled.

An article goes into a little more than you need at http://rajeev.name/2008/09/01/automated-osx-backups-with-launchd-and-rsync/ but basically what you need is:

  • A script or rsync command that syncs the information, he encapsulates it in laptop_rsync.sh, which you would only need to modify to change which directories are being backed up from and to.
  • A scheduled running of said command using launchd, the OS X replacement for cron.

Rajeev created a plist at /Library/LaunchAgents/name.rajeev.laptop_rsync.plist and manually populated it with some options in his article, but I would recommend building the shell script and calling it with Lingon, its really easy for scheduling these things. Finally, if you give your script a .command extension you can even click on it and run it manually for when you need to back these up right now.

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  • undeleting this in the hopes you switch to NTFS
    – ConstantineK
    Commented Apr 15, 2011 at 19:29

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