I have to cleanup my mails so here the link to the Apple Command-line backup documentation

Quote:

Backing up your hard drive is like going to the dentist: important, but unpleasant enough that it is easy to put off or forget. Because of that, the best way to keep your data safe is to schedule regular backups. While there are numerous commercial applications that address this need (including Apple’s .mac Backup), they tend to either require the user to be logged in, or be connected to an enterprise data center.

The traditional UNIX alternative is to run a command-line backup tool as part of a ‘cron’ script, but many system administrators are unaware of the variety of options available for unattended backups under Mac OS X.

This article discusses some of the issues faced in making backups, the special considerations of Mac OS X systems, a number of options which allow the creation of viable backups, and a few potential pitfalls of developing a backup system. This article does not cover BSD flags, or systems prior to Mac OS v10.4 Tiger. And for simplicity, this article assumes that you have not turned on ACLs (using Mac OS X Server or fsaclctl) on the filesystem you are wanting to back up. There are some subtleties in how these tools interact with ACLs that are beyond the scope of this article. Please consult the latest documentation for each tool for more details.

Links:

• Apple Command-line backup solutions document

If you need / want to backup your Windows XP /Vista bootcamp partition you should take a look at the application WinClone.

Just to clear the most important point: thats a mac application =) and its 10.5 only which makes sense cause of the beta status of bootcamp in 10.4

Feature-List:

• Requires Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) New
• Clone either FAT32 or NTFS partitions New
• Mount images in the Finder New
• Fixes boot issues automatically New
• New preference window to fine tune your cloning New
• Source partition is not changed when cloning (except for removal of pagefile.sys) New
• Clone Windows XP or Windows Vista with ease.
• Clone to your Bootcamp partition either on a separate drive or on the same that contains your Mac OS X partition.
• Creates image documents that can be stored on any media and double-clicked to open in WinClone.
• Verbose logging so you know what is going on
• Built on the open source ntfstools, which are included in Winclone, so you don’t have to install anything else.
• Fast: Restore a 10 GB image in less than 10 minutes.
• Create a Bootcamp partition from within Winclone.
• Do it all from the boot drive: You don’t need to boot from a Firewire drive to clone the Windows partition.
• Clean and uncomplicated interface

Links:

• WinClone
• Apple Inc. - Bootcamp Manual

Apple did a great step introducing Time Machine as an easy backup-solution for everyone (with a Mac & Mac OS 10.5).

While its a great thing in general it has to be configured for some users regarding the scheduling.

Till now the only solution i knew was editing

com.apple.backupd-auto.plist

Inside this file you have to modify the following section / key:

<key>StartInterval</key>
<integer>3600</integer>

Where 3600 represents 3600 seconds as backup interval.

Well for those unwilling to edit .plist files take a look at TimeMachineScheduler.

It can…..

Quote:

• Set the interval from 1 to 12 hours.
• Run the backup manually or automatically also at startup, login or when the daemon has been loaded.
• Display the status of the daemon, of the backup volume and if the backup is currently running.
• Automount, an option to mount and unmount the backup volume automatically (see known problems).
• Option to hide the backup volume (to take effect a Finder relaunch is required).

Links:

• TimeMachineScheduler Homepage
• Apple Time Machine

Bombich Software released Carbon Copy Cloner 3.1

Quote:

Among the new features are:

• Support for block-level disk-to-disk clones.
• Synchronization built-in, not bolted on.
• Support for backing up across the network to another Macintosh.
• Advanced scheduling capabilities — Backup tasks can now be scheduled on an hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly basis, or you can indicate that a backup task should run when the backup device is attached (e.g. an iPod). You don’t even need to be logged in for your backups to occur!
• CCC recognizes iPods specifically, allowing time for the iPod:iTunes synchronization to complete.
• The ability to drill down into folders to select exactly what gets copied and what doesn’t (you can drill down indefinitely).
• Built-in software update feature notifies you when updates are available.

See the complete release history here

James Duncan wrote an interessting article about restoring a Leopard installation from Time Machine.

His conclusion as quote:

In short, Time Machine passed the “Trust, but Verify” challenge with flying colors. I’m pretty happy about that as it means that I can recommend that my friends and family—including my Dad who just bought an iMac not too long ago—can use Time Machine as a totally automatic backup mechanism. There are, however, two caveats to using Time Machine as your only backup strategy. The first is that you really should keep your data in at least three places and one of those places should be offsite. You should either continue with your existing offsite backup strategy for your most important documents or maybe you should consider rotating two disks as Time Machine volumes. Then again, if you’re currently not backing up at all, having even a single Time Machine backup volume is a massive improvement.

The second caveat is that restoring from a Time Machine backup is not particularly fast. If you often find yourself on deadline, hitting a half-day’s worth of downtime due to a hard drive crash might not be acceptable to you. In fact, if you have a hard drive crash, you may be looking at a full day’s worth of downtime by the time you secure a new disk and install it. For folks like my Dad, this kind of thing isn’t too big an inconvenience. You can start up a backup, go off and do something else, and come back to a restored system. However, it’s the kind of thing that I’d like to try to avoid in my day to day work, especially when I’m on deadline. If this sounds like you, you’ll want to look at having a ready copy of your boot volume by using a tool like Carbon Copy Cloner. SuperDuper! has also been a great Mac OS X choice, but isn’t quite ready for Leopard yet. Hopefully, it will be soon.

Great……i was just going to test it myself…..but now ?

Yeah right…..Trust….but Verify hehe