Like Kris, we back up a number of MacBooks here using rsync via ssh, and have never had an issue.

Also like Kris, we only backup /Users which limits what we're backing up.  

Ray Frush               "Either you are part of the solution
T:970.288.6223               or part of the precipitate."
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 Avago Technologies | APD Technical Computing | IT Engineer

On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 10:48 AM, Justin Best <justin AT mjbest DOT com> wrote:

I’m a user of BackupPC from way back (2005-ish). Love the product (thanks Craig!!) and I”m looking forward to hearing any experiences with 4.0

I’ve got a couple sites with about 10-15 Macintosh machines (OS X 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, and 10.9) that I’m considering using BackupPC at. Does anybody else use BackupPC for backing up OSX machines? I’ve tried testing with rsync, but it seemed to simply hang when I tried to back up the entire folder structure (beginning with /). rsync also choked when I tried to backup my home directory in its entirety. It (rsync) seems only to work when I backup a small subset of data (I can successfully backup /Users/Justin/Desktop without any problems)

I’ve seen some suggestions that say “use xtar”, but don’t explain how to do this. I’ve tried installing xtar from helios.de, assuming that’s what others are referring to, but attempts to back up (choosing xfer method “tar”, setting the command to /usr/bin/xtar) and using this result in errors:

Contents of file /var/lib/backuppc/pc/justins-air.nwtechs.com/XferLOG.bad.z, modified 2013-12-04 09:47:29

--------------------

Running: /usr/bin/ssh -q -x -n -l root justins-air.nwtechs.com env LC_ALL=C /usr/bin/xtar -c -v -f - -C /Users/Justin/Desktop --totals .
full backup started for directory /Users/Justin/Desktop
Xfer PIDs are now 1317,1316
tarExtract: Use of qw(...) as parentheses is deprecated at /usr/share/backuppc/lib/BackupPC/Storage/Text.pm line 302.
tarExtract: Use of qw(...) as parentheses is deprecated at /usr/share/backuppc/lib/BackupPC/Lib.pm line 1425.
Tar exited with error 65280 () status
tarExtract: Done: 0 errors, 0 filesExist, 0 sizeExist, 0 sizeExistComp, 0 filesTotal, 0 sizeTotal
Got fatal error during xfer (No files dumped for share /Users/Justin/Desktop)
Backup aborted (No files dumped for share /Users/Justin/Desktop)
Not saving this as a partial backup since it has fewer files than the prior one (got 0 and 0 files versus 0)

--------------------

Anyone have advice for me? Should I give up and use a commercial tool like Retrospect for the macs, or should I press on?

Justin Best
360.513.1489

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