I have huge iPhoto and iTunes catalogs. This can present a problem for both loading the applications and for backup. I have learned to deal with the Application load times, but backups are very important to me.
I’d gone through the iPhoto backup process and restore more than once, and I didn’t like the fact that I didn’t have an offsite backup, so I paid for a flickr pro account ($24/yr, supports iPhoto export and RAW format). I had been simply copying my iTunes over to my NAS for a long time (as well as using Time Machine), but that became a chore because I had not automated it.
After about a month of off-and-on searching, I finally went back to my UNIX roots and decided on rsync.
You simply can’t beat rsync.
I wrote a very simple shell script to call from cron every night to sync whatever IU thought I needed to sync to my NAS (it works to any other source, really, due to rsync’s flexibility).
This is my simple rsync script:
#!/bin/sh
# Sync catalogs to externally mounted volume.
RSYNC=’/usr/bin/rsync’
ITUNESSRC=’/Users/Shared/iTunes’ # iTunes Folder
ITUNESDST=’/Volumes/Volume_1/Catalog\ Backups/iTunes’ #Destination for iTunes Backup
IPHOTOSRC=’/Users/Shared/iPhoto’ #iPhoto Folder
IPHOTODST=’/Volumes/Volume_1/Catalog\ Backups/iPhoto’ #Destination for iPhoto Backup
PARAMS=’–ignore-existing –delete –progress –recursive –perms –times –size-only –whole-file’ # Any parameters for rsync
EXCLUDEITUNES=’-exclude=’.*’ -exclude=’*.m4v” # Files or folders for exclusion
EXCLUDEIPHOTO=’-exclude=’.*” # Files or folders for exclusion
$RSYNC $PARAMS $EXCLUDEITUNES $ITUNESSRC $ITUNESDST
$RSYNC $PARAMS $EXCLUDEIPHOTO $IPHOTOSRC $IPHOTODST
Thats it. Since the “–delete” flag is in place, I recommend use of the “–dry-run” flag the first time to make sure it does what you want, since delete will remove everything in it’s path and make the folder match. I just have this run from cron every day using this line in my users crontab.
@daily /opt/local/bin/rsynccatalogs.sh
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