The Clone backup type
Full System Clone
This option will use rsync to create a complete copy of your internal drive, or any other volume or disk, to another disk or partiton. Clones are great since if you have a drive failure you can be back up and running in no time with a complete fresh copy of your original System and personal files. Clones are also good when installing a new System or update as you can select the attached clone disk to migrate all your personal files from at the end of the System install process (you will be asked if you want to do that.)
Full System Clone settings
- Create Recovery HD... If possible backupList+ will check if there is a Recovery Partition on the source disk and if so copy it to the destination disk. It will attempt to resize the source volume to create a small (650MB) partition there to receive the copied Recovery HD. The Recovery HD is created when you install a fresh OS version on a disk or volume. Normaly this is not copied with the source and technically is not really necessary if you are making a bootable clone from which to startup and restore files from. Some people like it as extra insrurance though, should something go wrong and a volume is unable to mount as a viable system. To test the recovery HD, startup and hold the option key to select it in the list of startup volumes. Or Press Command-R at startup to automatically start from Recovery where you will have options to reinstall the OS, run Disk Utility or other tasks. Note: this option only runs when the clone is started manually, and not from a scheduled backup. There are times when the Recovery HD will fail to be created for various reasons and you can either try again or run the clone without checking this option.
- Delete older files... This causes rsync to delete any files on the destination that are not on the source, or ones that are older than the modified version on the source. Warning! This is a destructive action and will cause loss of any data in the destination directory that is not present in the source directory. You must know what you are doing with this choice or risk data loss. You can add the "Archive" option below as a safety feature.
- Archive deleted files... This option create a special archive folder called "BL_Archive" in the destination. Inside, individual dated archives will be created for each backup to that destination and will save any deleted or modified files on destination to the archive folders. This option is usually used with the "delete" option above but if "delete" option is not selected it will save the modified files. I am working on a future "Prune" feature so the archives can be limited in number or size. This is added protection against accidentally deleting important files. Note: using this option for a full System clone will archive many system files that change constantly possibly resulting big archives of large files that are of no use as the clone will use the newer files and not archived ones. This may not be desirable. If you do a regular type backup of your personal files, home folder etc., this option will preserve just your own files that are deleted or modified.
Clone options
- Clone using rysnc (updates): will perform a full system copy to the destination disk and update any changed files.
- Clone using rsync - erase destination: will erase the destination disk before performing a fresh clean backup of your system. Note: This will erase the destination volume completely which means all data will be lost!
- Block level clone: This option uses apple's asr to perform a block level clone which will mkae an exact replica of the source drive to the destination. It is usually much faster and will make an exact replica, including any bugs or issues with the source volume's system. Note: This will erase the destination volume completely which means all data will be lost! for this type of clone opertation, both soucre and destination volumes must be un-mountable so you must be booted from another volume than the source and destination volumes.
Backing up to a sparse disk image
You can have backupList+ create a sparse disk image, mount the image and then copy the source files into it. You can do this with regular, incremental or clone type backups.
Sparse disk image: Sparse images grow in size to the maximum you enter in the text field. With this option backuplist+ will create the sparseimage, mount it and copy the source files into it. The next time you run this backup set, backuplist+ will mount the image and update the source files with any new changes.You must enter a size for the initial disk image. This should be the maximum size you think the sparse image will need. It will however only occupy the disk space of its contained files which is very nice.