In Through The Out Door

They are already installed on Mac OS X, and most linux / unix servers.Step 1 – Create a folder to store your backups on the remote servermkdir backupMake sure that your SSH user has permission to write to this directory.Step 2 – Setup automatic authentication OptionalThis step allows the backups to run without prompting you for a password when it runs. You can omit this step but you will have to type in your ssh password each you run backup.I wrote an article called Setting up public key authentication over SSH that will guide you through this step.If you own the server you might also want to create a user specifically for this process.Step 3 – Use rsync to backup files incrementallyrsync -e “ssh” -rca –delete-after ~/test/ pete@myserver.example.com:backupNow lets break it down a bit: rsync – this syncs the local directory to with the server directory. -e “ssh” – this tells rsync to use ssh if your want to pass in other ssh options such as port you can do that in the quotes: -e “ssh -p 12345” -rca recursive, checksum, and archive –delete-after – this will delete files on the server if you delete them locally…. Excluding directoriesSometimes you might want to exclude a directory from being backed up, perhaps your Music directory since that is already backed up on your ipod.rsync -e “ssh” -rca –delete-after –exclude=Music –delete-excluded ~/test/ pete@myserver.example.com:backupStep 4 – Schedule it with cron OptionalNow lets create a cron job (scheduled task) to run this script every day. First make a new file called backup.sh in your home directory.#!/bin/shrsync -e “ssh” -rca –delete-after ~/test/ pete@myserver.example.com:backupNow sure make the file is executable: chmod ug+x backup.shNext type crontab -e this will open up your scheduled tasks list, in most cases it will open an empty file.

MacBook Pro:Apple’s portables were stuck in a system bandwidth mire for years with the G4. Now the MacBook Pro is here. Was the wait worth it? Ars reviews Apple’s latest laptop and compares it not only against a PowerBook G4, but a Dell Inspiron running Mac OS X.We at the Orbiting HQ were able to have some benchmarks run on an acquaintance’s Dell Inspiron 9100 with a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 HT chip running OS X 10.4.4, and decided that including the benchmarks from this machine would prove to be both interesting if not illustrative of what non-Apple x86 machines may be capable of if they could run Mac OS X (legally). Read on to find out how well the MacBook Pro fared against the other two machines, as well as just about everything else you want to now about Apple’s first Intel laptop.