1. Installation

Put rsyncbackup wherever you'd like. In example ~/bin or /usr/local/bin. Remember where you put it so you can upgrade it later, and put the full path in the crontab file. Be sure that the directory you put it is in your $PATH.

Additionally put the backup folder in your home folder. Then you have two important directories, ~/backup where your configuration is, and ~/backup/logs where your logs appear. You can optionally override the location of your backup directory at runtime with the -x option.

If you like (probably), get the rsyncX package to support resource forks, and setup the configuration files to backup the way you want.

If you want to send e-mail when errors occurs with scheduled backups, then configure postfix or sendmail on your computer. I recommend the very user-friendly free GUI application Postfix Enabler.

1.1. Resource forks

The default installation of rsync on Mac OS X, does NOT support resource forks. So go get this package, and install it, and then rsyncbackup will support resource forks.

RsyncX 2.1

Other OS than Mac OS X and resource forks

Backing up with resource forks works locally, and to another Mac OS X computer with RsyncX. Backing up with resource fork to a non-Mac UNIX, like Linux or FreeBSD is currently not possible. Backup to such computers is supported without resource forks.

1.2. Extra tools

rsyncbackup provides a few tools which can be handy for setting up a complete backup solution. The set of tools will probably expand in newer version of rsyncbackup. Currently two tools are included; isrunning and isnotrunning. To install theese tools, put them in a bin directory inside your PATH, in example /usr/local/bin.