Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with mac and backup

Help me recover a deleted MySQL database on osx

special-k — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 10:19:16 -0800

Where does MySQL store actual data in Snow Leopard? How would I retrieve a deleted database from a Time Machine backup? MySQL was crashing repeatedly on my Snow Leopard. On the advice of an Apple genius, I nuked the existing install and all its associated directories. I didn't worry much because I do database stuff on my work computer and only keep copies on my laptop.

Turns out that there was one particular database [now nuked] that I spent a whole week cleaning up on my laptop. The desktop only has a really old version of this particular database.

I have regular time machine backups. How do I pluck this database out and restore it?
I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get to the data without going through mysql. Someone suggested looking in /usr/local/mysql/data

I can get to the mysql directory but have no permission to enter the data directory. I could recreate much of this work but it will take forever and I'd rather not. Can someone help?

Backing up a messed up older Mac?

southvie — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:59:51 -0800

Best method/software for efficient, non-annoying backup for a slightly older Mac (G4 running 10.3.9)? Trying to back up a ton of Pro Tools sessions and other audio junk from an older G4 running OS X 10.3.9 onto a newish LaCie external drive. From several years of misuse, mismanagement and abuse, there are a lot of duplicate and corrupt files. Simply dragging and dropping the folders in Finder is getting annoying, because every time it encounters a corrupt or wonky file I have to start over and be super-diligent to ensure every single possible file is copied. Trying to get about 200G copied this way is becoming annoying and wasting lots of time.

Is there a better method or application I could use (ideally, free or cheap) to let this run for hours and have it automatically skip, check or even fix any messed up files -- and just have it done?

I'm writing a terrible novel and it would be a huge loss if it disappeared

tylerfulltilt — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:31:48 -0800

Help me come up with some sort of automated way of sending a file to myself in gmail. Writing a novel. Paranoid about losing it. Currently backing it up to two different ipods and a thumb drive after each writing session, in addition to saving it on the laptop drive.

I'm also sending the file to myself in gmail after each session. However, this process gets annoying. Is there any way to create some sort of script or macro or something that I can click with one button to automatically open safari, navigate to my gmail account, fill in the fields, attach the file and and send it to myself?

If I'm asking for something ridiculous feel free to say so.
Using an iBook g4 with leopard installed.

backup --> iPod

Jaltcoh — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:00:25 -0800

Trying to get my music library from my external hard drive back onto my iPod while maintaining my sanity. (Apologies in advance for the lengthy/convoluted question.) I recently started having problems with my iPod and realized I should make sure to have a perfect, up-to-date backup. I started by turning on the iPod's hidden files. If you're familiar with these hidden files, you know that they have randomly generated names like "VCKT.m4a," "BBLC.m4a," etc. (no apparent indication of which songs these are), and they're in folders called "F00," "F01," etc. (Mine go up to F49 since I have over 7,000 songs.) I copied all of these files to my external hard drive. At the time this seemed like a really smart, thorough way to do it.

Then I went to the Apple Store and got my iPod fixed, which involved them restoring my iPod. So now I need to recreate my music library in my iPod using the external hard drive.

I thought this would be pretty simple: plug in the iPod and external hard drive to my Macbook at the same time, then drag and drop all the folders -- F00 through F49 -- from the external hard drive to the iPod, right? Well, I did this, and the cryptically named files do appear in the iPod when you look at the iPod's contents in the desktop. But if you try to use the iPod as a normal music-playing device, it doesn't work -- there are no songs that show up for you to listen to (whether you're looking at it in iTunes or disconnected from the computer).

I again thought I was being smart by seeing what happens when I "open" one of the hidden files. Hey cool, a random song gets copied to iTunes! And it's a normal song -- not "VCKT.m4a" but something I can actually listen to, with a song title in English, etc. Of course, I can then drag and drop this song from iTunes into my iPod. At first I thought this would be the solution: just do the same thing for all the songs.

But there are a couple problems with that, and I'd really appreciate any help getting around them. As I said, I have over 7,000 songs, roughly 70 GB of music. My computer's hard drive has about 4 GB left. So if I were to just open all the hidden files from my iPod into iTunes at once, it'd be a disaster: at best, I'd quickly get a message telling me my computer's hard drive couldn't hold any more. (And I'd be afraid I wouldn't be so lucky -- the hard drive could get filled up and paralyzed. This happened to someone I know.)

So, should I just copy the hidden files one folder at a time? I could do that, but that would mean opening up the songs from "F00," waiting for them to get copied to iTunes, then waiting for them to get copied to the iPod, then deleting those songs from iTunes and emptying the trash, then moving on to "F01" ... and repeating that whole thing 50 times. I'd like to avoid that if I can.

So my questions are:

(1) Is there an easier way to do this? I'd love to be able to just get it started, then sit back and let the computer handle it.

(2) I already feel kind of silly for how much of a minor ordeal this has turned into as a result of my backup method that I (mistakenly?) thought was so clever. Could someone please assure me that there's a way to follow through with this that won't mess things up even further?

(In case it's relevant, my external hard drive holds about 500 GB, I have a 160 GB iPod, and I'm using Mac OS 10.4.11.)

Mac Backup Nirvana with Encryption, Per-File, and Snapshotting

rcs — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:54:23 -0800

Mac Backup Filter: Help me achieve Nirvana with Time Machine, FileVault, and a snapshotting tool. Difficulty rating: FileVault and virtual machine images. I've been trying to get all my ducks in a row with backup from my Macbook. I have enough space to back things up to, and currently have TimeMachine and Carbon Copy Cloner set up.

I'm not tied to any of these pieces of software. For a TimeMachine replacement, I'd be fine with something that ran in the background and had an even moderately friendly interface for restoration. For snapshots and cloning, I'm willing to pay for SuperDuper if it makes any of this easier, or any other piece of software, for that matter. I'm open to things involve a significant degree of hackery to set up as long as they're transparent and mostly fool proof past that.

Problem 1: I'd love to use FileVault, but I really never log out. Is there any good way to get transparent encryption working for myself without changing my daily use patterns? My second concern with this is the fact that TimeMachine doesn't really work well in this situation, from what I've found, lacking the ability to restore individual files. I'm fine with unencrypted backups in this situation.

Problem 2: Unmounting the drives when I take the laptop away from the desk. Is there a method for only mounting the drive for use when TimeMachine's open? I'd prefer something that automatically mounted the drive when TimeMachine was running, and unmounted afterwards, and similarly for browsing backups for recovery. It's the same situation with Carbon Copy Cloner.

Problem 3: VMWare Images. Backing up big binary blobs doesn't strike me as the Best Practice way to do this. I know I can break the disk images up into discrete chunks, but even then it doesn't really solve the problem.

Problem 4: With two different backup schemes (per file, and snapshot) the processes sometimes like to run over each other and slow each other down. A Perfect Solution would avoid this.

Problem 5: The snapshot/clone looks like it's using rsync on the backend, which chews up way more time generating the file list over the drive than it does comparing files or actually backing up. Is there a way around this? I can't imagine that in the days of things like inotify the only way to get changed files is by checking every file.

Any even partial solutions to any of these problems is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

RAID and backup system for Mac Pro?

shinynewnick — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:08:11 -0800

Best RAID / Backup system for HD video on a Mac Pro? I was in the process of building myself a nice little external RAID enclosure with four 1 TB drives, when I started digging into the articles and realizing that RAID isn't backup.

Now I have these 4 1 TB drives, a couple of 500 GB drives, 1 TB internal, and 640 GB system drive for my Mac Pro. So I'm looking for the best way to set up these drives in my workflow for producing HD video.

Here are my basic needs:

1. Reliable Daily backups - Daily backups of all my work. I'm still thinking of using the RAID esata box as a RAID1 setup, to prevent downtime if a drive goes down.

2. Long term backups - When a project is finished, moving the data off the working drive and onto two separate hard drives for storage. I'll buy additional 500 GB drives for this purpose as needed.

3. Speed isn't crucial, as I'm not working in uncompressed HD.

Time Machine seems to be a great built in system, and I'd like to take advantage of that. I'm also signing up for Carbonite for online backup of as much information as I can.

Any thoughts on the workflow and the best way to automate the system would be greatly appreciated.

How to completely clear Apple Address Book in preparation for recovery?

odinsdream — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 08:22:22 -0800

Recovering Address Book data. Apple Address Book phantom entries keep returning, even after deleting the data files and prefs lists. Where are they coming from? How can I get the original data back? I'm trying to help someone recover their address book data after they upgraded from Tiger to Snow Leopard.

They started with around 200 address cards. After the Snow Leopard upgrade they have 20. These 20 don't seem to have anything in common with eachother.

Several online resources indicate that I could use the file:

~\Library\Application Support\Address Book\AddressBook.data.previous

...by deleting the AddressBook.data file, and renaming the above to sit in its place. I've sifted through the AddressBook.data.previous file with an editor. It's 1.9 MB, and appears to contain all of her 200 cards.

I haven't been able to get the replacement working, though, because of this oddity:

1. Close Mail, Address Book, iCal.
2. Delete the entire ~\Library\Application Support\Address Book folder, and delete all of the ~\Library\Preferences\com.apple.addressbook* files.
3. Re-open Address Book.

Result: Those 20 cards are back. The Address Book comes up empty first, then these cards magically appear. The Application Support\Address Book folder now contains data related to these cards, where before it didn't even exist.

MobileMe sync is disabled. There is no other Sync option in the Address Book preferences Accounts area. Where are these cards coming from?

I have a feeling that if I solve this part, I could probably get the recovery working, but I'm stumped.

How do I stop my external hard drives from changing disk IDs when I reboot on OS X?

triolus — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 20:08:06 -0800

How do I stop my external hard drives from changing disk IDs when I reboot on OS X? I have a simple rsync script that I just made for my OS X machine to backup data on my two main drives to two drives in an external enclosure. I wanted the script to mount and unmount the drives so that they wouldn't clutter my desktop and to keep them "hidden".

The problem is that the disk ID under /dev changes everytime I reboot. Sometimes the drive mounted at /Volumes/backup1 will be at /dev/disk3s3 and sometimes it will be at /dev/disk4s3. Other times it will be at /dev/disk2s3.

Is there anyway to keep the disk ID static, or to just mount by the directory name? I'm running 10.5.8, with the latest updates. My script uses the `diskutil`command to mount and unmount the drives. Oh, and AFAIK, Time Machine only works with one drive as a backup.

Automated backup for USB flash drives?

modernnomad — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:59:12 -0800

Is there a way to automatically back up certain folders on my hard drive to a USB key every time a plug in that key? I'm on Mac OS X 10.5 and have an 8GB flash drive. I'm wondering if there is any automated process out there that will, every time I plug it in, copy over any changed files in (for example) my documents folder. I am not looking for proprietary archiving; I want the files to then be accessible on any other computer I plug the USB key into -- I just want to automate the copying process.

How secure is Time Machine backups?

Leech — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 10:07:57 -0800

How secure is Time Machine backups? I'm worried about security of the data stored by Time Machine. I'm worried about security of the data stored by Time Machine.

I have a WD My Passport external HD that I use with Time Machine for my complete backups.
But I'm worried if I lost the external HD or someone stole it.
Is the data accessible? Or it's encrypted in some way?

Is there a way to automatically encrypt it?

Because I travel a lot and I think it probably could be a big problem if it's accessible to anyone that connect it to a mac (because it's formatted to mac).

Thanks.

Is it possible to boot a cloned MacBook drive onto a Mac Mini and continue about my business?

prggr — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:10:30 -0800

Is it possible to boot a cloned MacBook drive onto a Mac Mini and continue about my business? Alright, so I flew across the country yesterday and I left my MacBook at the TSA checkpoint. After much freaking out, I managed to get it located and am getting it overnighted back to me. Right now I'm poking along with my last backup on a Windows machine trying to cobble together enough things to get some work done. It got me to thinking about other ways to deal with a lack of my primary machine.. As standard procedure, I use carbon copy cloner on my Macbook to a firewire drive about once a month. Nightly I rsync everything from my Users directory. I have booted off the drive on my Macbook before and verified things work fine that way (actually, booting off the Firewire drive is faster than the internal drive.. ). I was wondering, if I picked up an Intel Mac Mini just as a spare machine, would I be able to just boot off of that external drive even though it is a clone of the Macbook and just keep on trucking? Would the OSX from the Macbook boot on the Mini via the cloned drive or would I then need to reinstall OSX with the Mini's copy to do what I'm thinking?

How do I automatically backup a website (files and database) to a Mac?

HC Foo — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 10:31:21 -0800

What is the best way to automatically backup a website (files and database) to a Mac? Suggestions for Windows? I build websites, and I have a client who pretty much only has Macs. They want a solution where they can automatically backup an entire website (files and database) to their machines. I have access to the admin area of the hosting account. If I'm unable to find an easy to install/use solution for the Mac, a Windows solution would also work.

Baby got too much back

lukemeister — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 08:53:41 -0800

How can I consolidate all my pictures, music, pdf files, etc. from multiple drives? I have about 10 external drives containing photos and so forth. Different drives contain some duplicates, but the individual drives do not. Say I want to copy the files from DRIVE1, DRIVE2, etc. to UBERDRIVE, which has room for everything. My first thought was

cd /Volumes/DRIVE1; find . -name "*.jpg" -exec cp {} /Volumes/UBERDRIVE/Pictures/ \;

and then repeating the process for DRIVE2 and so on.

I tried this for DRIVE1, and it seems to be really slow. (It's taken 10 hours thus far to find 100,000 jpgs on a new MacBook Pro.) Also, I think my current procedure will overwrite files with the same name, even if they're different files.

Does anyone have a better approach? Thanks!

I'm running Leopard, but I also have machines running Vista, XP, and Fedora 10.

Mac backup DVD software

jcdill — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 20:28:51 -0800

I need recommendations for Mac backup / archive software to make DVDs that fill each DVD to capacity with files from a group of folders. I'm using a MacBook Pro with OS X 10.5. I've searched the archives, but I can't find any recent posts on this topic - most of the threads I read were 2-3 years old, or older.

I am a pro photographer, and I have 2 TBs of photos stored on external drives. Periodically I backup data from my laptop to the current external drive, and also make DVDs so I have 2 copies of all files, on 2 different media (DVD, hard drive) which I can store in 2 places (here, and offsite). I need a solution that will take a group of ~10-40 folders, and make DVDs filling up each DVD as it goes. I also need to know what files were on each DVD - a plain text index file that I can write to the first or last DVD in each burn set would suffice.

Bonus if the software is open source or free software. Compression is not important - RAW photo files don't compress very effectively.

I'm NOT interested in using online archive services such as .mac (MobileMe) or Amazon's S3. With 2 almost TBs of data, growing by many GBs every month, the monthly hosting fees for these services are not within my budget.

Back my Mac up online

c:\awesome — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 10:46:37 -0800

What's the best software for automated online backups for OSX? I have a Dreamhost account with unlimited storage and transfer, and I'd like to use that as a place to remotely backup the data on my Macbook Pro (mostly photos from iPhoto). MobileMe is a ripoff.

You'd think there'd be a nice piece of software that runs in the background and allows me to set a few directories to be synced, and any additions to those folders are automatically reflected online. True? Something that uses SSH or FTP, maybe?

I know about rsync but I'm stupid and I want a GUI.

What are my options?

Email client not working properly? You don't say...

GleepGlop — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:43:46 -0800

I created an Automator Workflow to do a daily automatic offsite backup of my documents. The only snag is that when I get my mac's Mail program to send the email to my gmail account, most of the time the message just sits in the outbox and doesn't actually send; but sometimes it starts sending right away. What gives?

How do I protect my backup drive?

truth1ness — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:47:12 -0800

How do I secure my backup hard drive that I copy my computer's content onto? I use SuperDuper on my Mac and copy my whole bootable disk image to a backup drive connected to my computer. Now, my computer is pretty well protected, I have passwords to get into any account and on my screensaver. When logged in as one user, you can't access files in another user's folder.
However, it seems like the weak spot in my security is the hard drive that I back up to. When I access the drive and look at the files, I'm able to get into every folder and see everything and never have to access a password. Someone could take my hard drive and have all my information.
So how to I protect my backup hard drive? Is there a way to password protect its contents, encrypt it somehow, etc? Is it something I would do in SuperDuper or do I need another program? Would turning on Mac's built in FileVault encryption on my computer protect me (I've never used it so I'm not sure how it works)?

Help Me Set Up Auto Backup on a 10.4 Mac

sjuhawk31 — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 10:31:35 -0800

BackupFilter: My boss has a Seagate FreeAgent external drive attached to her Macbook Pro. Using the drive manager software that came with it, I set up scheduled backups for her on MWF at noon. Problem is, it doesn't follow the schedule and won't back up at all. I've already lost a battle with IT to have Leopard installed on the office computers, so I'm trying to find a way to let my non-savvy coworkers do automatic backups. I thought this was the solution. Where am I going wrong?

My best guess is that you have to have the program open for it to run the scheduled backup. But doesn't that defeat the purpose of the schedule?

I'd really like to not invoke other software, if possible.

Mac server backup software

jmd82 — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 07:36:12 -0800

Getting some Mac servers and looking for suggestions on backup software. I'm completely new to the Mac scene, but we're converting from a Windows to Mac environment which will eventually host 700 or so clients and am getting some Mac OSX servers we'll be using as file & print server, iCal, wiki, etc, initially, but host more applications as this project grows.

The problem is that from what I've gathered, Retrospect is one of the few cheaper enterprise Mac solutions (as in under $2000 per edu license), but apparently hasn't been updated in quite some time and is mainly used for just data backup, not SQL/db/user profiles/system state/etc applications like Backup Exec or True Image.

So, any suggestions for backup software on Mac servers?

(I've also read previous mac backup questions, and they were all more along the line of personal backup data or SOHOs, whereas I'm looking more for disaster recovery capability to restore everything in one click, which again, sounds like Retrospect isn't ideal for).

MacFilter: Upgraded my hard drive using SuperDuper to clone, but Time Machine backed up the entire drive after the swap. How to prevent this?

kenliu — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 16:47:38 -0800

MacFilter: Upgraded my hard drive using SuperDuper to clone, but Time Machine backed up the entire drive after the swap. How to prevent this? I used SuperDuper to clone my internal laptop hard disk onto a larger hard disk in an external enclosure. The cloning process went fine, and I swapped the internal drive with the cloned one. Works great.

Unfortunately, next time I ran Time Machine, it backed up the entire contents of the freshly cloned drive onto the TM drive, thus eating up ~80GB of my TM drive. Now I need to replace my internal drive again (the replacement was too power hungry) but don't want TM to eat up another 80 GB.

Any way to prevent Time Machine from trying to back up the cloned drive?

Question about sensitive data, erasing files, and backup drives.

Anonymous — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:37:00 -0800

Question about sensitive data, erasing files, and backup drives. If a file is deleted from a computer, I know that the data may be still be retrievable from the hard drive. I am aware that you can "wipe" unused data or an entire drive by overwriting with 1 or more passes of random data.

Rather than overwrite to erase unused space, I've chosen to upgrade to a new, larger, internal hard drive. I plan to destroy/discard the current one after the upgrade.

I have a bootable backup of my Mac's hard drive, created with SuperDuper. Here's my question... if I install a new hard drive and copy the entire contents of the old hard drive to the new one, am I also copying deleted files that may still exist in "unused space"?

In other words - are deleted files on my laptop duplicated on an external hard drive when creating a backup?

Backing up bootable image over a LAN?

nasty, brutish, and of average height — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 08:15:52 -0800

I'd like to create a bootable backup of my MacBook's hard drive 150GB hard drive. I've got a 500GB drive, but it's in an Ubuntu server on my LAN. Is there a good way to back up a bootable backup to another computer? And what would my restore situation be? I know Macs can netboot, but I don't know anything about it. Would I move the whole image to my laptop using target disk mode, or something similar? I've never worked with full, disk image backups.

Only other detail is, I'd like to do this weekly or so. However, I don't suspect that scheduling it will be the difficult part of this plan...

OS X Time Machine backup with USB disc as one source

superfurry — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 03:45:40 -0800

OS X Backup Filter. I use a mac mini with it's limited had disc space, so also use an external USB drive to store big stuff like my iTunes Library, Lightroom Catalog, and Downloads. I need automatic backup help. I also have a second USB disc attached for backups, but since Time Machine can't use a USB disc as a source, I can only use Time Machine as a method of backing up what's on my internal hard disc on the mini, and I need to do all backups of my external disc manually. As you can imagine, since it's manual I very rarely do it but at the same time the data on the external drive is much more sensitive. So I need a way to automatically backup everything from both internal and external discs, to another external disc. Any ideas ?

Requirements:
Needs to be automated/provide scheduled backup capability
Can backup both internal and external USB/FireWire disc sources to external USB/FireWire destination.
A Time machine hack/plugin etc would be preferable
Free would be preferable, though I would be willing to pay for a reliable easy to use app

Help me backup my system.

arniec — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 09:39:08 -0800

Data Backup Filter: I have about 6TB (yes TB, not GB) of data. I need to back it up BEFORE it crashes. I also need a good way to share it on the network. How can I do this? Details within... Yes, this topic revisited again. None of the questions asked so far have helped in my situation.

It seems the era of digital video and digital audio has created a storage nightmare for me. I have 6TB of data spread across 5 external hard drives (3 500GBs and 4 1 TBs, not all full). They are all currently connected to a Windows PC.

I have 1 blank 1TB drive which I just attached to my Mac Mini as I'm trying to retire my Windows PC and migrate all data to the Mac FS so I can run it off my Airport Extreme's USB port (the Airport Extreme won't read NTFS).

I've looked at "mirroring" my external drives nightly using a backup program but this does not safeguard me in case of electrical storm, fire, angry wife, etc. Besides, there must be a limit to the number of external drives I have...I'm running out of outlets quickly.

But I cannot imagine putting all of this information on DVDs, the time and expense would be insane. Online backup systems are not optimal as there is sensitive personal data in the files and I don't trust the privacy of online backup solutions, but the cost for 6TB is prohibitive.

I do have a lot of "redundant" files that I am attempting to clean up (previous hard drive crashes in my Windows PC resulted in panicked "copy off all my files!" moments, and as such I'm sure at least 1TB of my data is redundant, but the time it's taking me to sort this out file by file is crazy). Are there any programs (Windows or Mac) that can find these and only back them up once, saving me on DVDs?

Do I have any other options besides "buy a lot more external hard drives"?

How do I back up a large amount of data to DVDs?

david06 — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 23:50:01 -0800

Can you suggest improvements and help me work out the details of my plan to back up several hundred GB using the Mac? I just dug a box of CD-Rs from 1998 out of a box - the first CDs I burned just after I got a burner. On them are files going back to when I started using computers, and out of 20 discs or so, only a few files on one disc were corrupted. I wouldn't have been heartbroken if any of these files went missing, but I would if a lot of files I've created since were to disappear, especially because photography has become digital. Additionally, I've recently had several thousand negatives of old family photos scanned.

My data is fairly well backed up across multiple hard drives, but I still feel somewhat vulnerable without having any backup which is not a hard drive. I have several hundred GB of data at this point for which I would like a backup I can toss in a box for 10 years like my CDs from 1998 -- something off-line, permanent, with at least several decades expected realistic lifetime.

My plan:

1. Create a DMG as large as I anticipate the total amount of data to be.

2. Copy everything I'd like to back up to this DMG.

3. Using some sort of standard terminal commands built into OS X which I forget (any help here?), split this huge DMG file into parts sized to fit onto DVDs (haven't decided between single and double layer yet).

4. Using MacPar create parity files sized the same as the regular part files. The advantage of doing this is that I can say "as long as less than 10%, or any percentage I decide, of discs are corrupted when I want to restore my files, I can restore all of my data bit-for-bit." The disadvantage of this is that if too many discs are corrupted, I lose EVERYTHING, as opposed to if I had just put files on discs without enclosing them in an image.

I feel that the tradeoff described in #4 is worth it, considering that it is a royal pain in the ass to manually split up a ton of files onto separate discs.

Another thing that I have thought about is that this scheme relies entirely on formats which are pretty standard, maybe even open source. PAR, DMG, and the unix-based split/join commands (hopefully someone will remind me what these are) will be possible to access for a very, very long time. The weird proprietary format for some random backup program, not so much.

I anticipate that it will take a few hours at once to create the split image files, perhaps overnight or more to create the PARs (but this time is unattended), and then I can burn them over a few days/weeks. Not too bad.

Can anyone comment on this, or suggest an easier/better way to create an optical backup of 200 GB of files or so?