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Comment by ta_tmachine | Hacker News Reader

When will this trend of "like time machine" backup software going to stop ?

Time Machine, as can be seen here http://www.apple.com/support/timemachine/ time machine is tightly integrated in the os and provides a self-defining interface and user experience.

This github page is for a wrapper shell script around rsync, which is not like time machine.

This has been going on for a while now, see Timevault (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TimeVault ), back in time (http://backintime.le-web.org/ ) or flyback (http://www.flyback-project.org/ ).

Please telling us your backup solution is like time machine when it lacks the kind of UX time machine offers, thanks !

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I love/hate Time Machine and would love to switch to something better. The problem is that to be secure, you need both versioned backups and redundant storage of the backup. Time Machine has trouble with network volumes (this doesn't stop me from using my DroboFS but I have to struggle with it regularly). It also doesn't have a cloud backend. Best option to have both is Crashplan, but the UI sucks. So if there's anyone else like me, we're regularly in the market for considering options that offers all of redundancy, version history, and a solid UI.

Time Machine is a great "enable and forget about it" solution, however it has some limitations too. For example, it can only backup to a drive, not to a folder within the drive. Also, in my case, I wanted to backup the Users folder of my Windows Bootcamp partition but it cannot be done. Excluding files during the backup is also not possible. The nice thing about a small bash script to handle all this is that it can be easily customized to your needs.

Please elaborate on what you are missing from the wanna-bes

I think the author said what they wanted: a Timemachine-style UX.

I would guess something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDPzVdohrck#t=1m13s

Oh, and integration with the OS X recovery partition / OS reinstallation mechanism that allows you to point to a Time Machine backup as the recovery point for your re-installation.

The integration with OS reinstall works very well, and is pretty seamless from the user's perspective. I used to do two backups-- a local TM backup and a separate cloud backup, but I found it was actually easier to just use Automator to up mount my TM volume once a day, image it, and send that up to the cloud. When my TM volume failed last year, I just pulled the latest image and put it on a replacement drive, and I was back up and running.

TM has had a few problems, but by and large it is one of the quiet successes in OS X, and probably my favorite feature if the OS. Why Microsoft hasn't put something like it in Windows is baffling to me.

Could you please share how you did that in Automaton? I'd love to do that to my backups.

I found that just running an Automator script for the "new disk image from selection" command on the root of the drive worked perfectly-- set an iCal event to run that script once a day, and you're done.

Be sure to test this to make sure it restores, but in my case it works flawlessly.

Thanks!

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