Long-term Memory

I was under the illusion that a Time Machine backup would do as they claim:

You can set up Time Machine to automatically back up all your important files, including your documents, music, photos, applications, and any other items you keep on your hard disk.

I consider my iTunes authorizations important, but apparently Apple does not. Seems that these are specifically excluded from backups… Removing the “SC Info” line from the /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/StdExclusions.plist file solved this.

I know I should have de-authorized my machine before reinstalling, and I know you can “de-authorize all” to fix this as well; but it’s pretty disturbing to see iTunes remove all your applications from your iPhone…

I think I can skip the buildup on why backups are important and I’ll focus this post on the “how”. There are a lot of ways to make backups. Obviously some are better than others; in this post I’ll just explain how I do my backups.

The script I use was designed with the following items in mind:

• The storage medium is a hard drive. This has some advantages like random-access which can be used.
• Storage capacity should be as small as possible; differential and/or incremental backups are almost unavoidable in this.
• The backups should be pulled from the server. This way you know when a server is behaving strangely. If you push your backups and the server has a bad day, he won’t tell you that he forgot his backups!
• Since the backup contains sensitive data (eg SSL private keys, /etc/shadow), the network transfer should be encrypted.
• The backup needs to be taken as root. This is the only way to ensure that all files could be read. (Yes, technically you could use specific capabilities instead of root)

Continue reading ‘Backup script – incremental snapshots’ »