Backup for Macintosh Computers

Links

Mac OS X: Automatically connect to a network drive when your computer starts up or wakes from sleep
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/turn-nas-windows-share-time-machine-backup/

Steps

How to set up a Macintosh computer to be backed up to a department server

• Ask Dale to create an account and backup space on the server
• Mount the backup share smb://biostat064a.dhcp.mc.vanderbilt.edu/vunetid_backup where "vunetid" is your VUNetID
  • Finder...Go menu...Connect to Server
  • Enter server address smb://biostat064a.dhcp.mc.vanderbilt.edu/vunetid_backup and click Connect
  • Enter username as "vanderbilt\vunetid" and use your epassword
  • Set remember password if you don't want to enter the password each time you log on
  • Set share to be connected automatically when logging on
    • Open System Preferences and click on "Users & Groups"
    • Click on Login items tab (right side, near top)
    • Click on + sign to add a new item to open automatically
    • Highlight the mounted backup space and click the Add button
• Make a directory to hold the backup script

$ mkdir ~/bin

• Copy the backup script backup-userhome to ~/bin
• Edit backup-userhome script and replace "vunetid" with your VUNetID
• Copy the exclude file rsync-exclude.txt to ~
• Set up a cron job to run the backup script on a schedule

$ crontab -l
$ crontab -e

e.g.

00 20 * * * /Users/vunetid/bin/backup-userhome >> /Users/vunetid/bin/backup-userhome.log 2>&1

This command will cause the backup script to be run at 8:00 PM each day. A log file called "backup-userhome.log" is written to the ~/bin directory.

By default, the computer will not wake up for a cron job if it is asleep. The solution to this is to schedule a wake up just before the cron job is to run.

• System Preferences
• Energy Saver
• Click the Schedule button
• Select Start or Wake and set the days and time appropriately.