macOS Backing up your dev mac

[Colonel Panik]

Hey everyone,
I do dev work on my Mac. I'm looking for a cloud backup solution that includes the whole Mac OS.
BackBlaze excludes certain folders, so for example, my MAMP will not get backed up (/Applications is excluded).
How do you backup Node and Homebrew packages (or anything in /usr).

 

[Senor Cuete]

Hey everyone,
I do dev work on my Mac. I'm looking for a cloud backup solution that includes the whole Mac OS.
BackBlaze excludes certain folders, so for example, my MAMP will not get backed up (/Applications is excluded).
How do you backup Node and Homebrew packages (or anything in /usr).

Personally I have an external hard drive set up as a Time Machine backup. When the house was hit by lightening and my Mac was toast, the initialization process in the new Mac asked me if I was cloning another Mac. I hit the yes button, selected the drive and my old Mac was cloned quite fast. Also When I release a new version of a program I burn the project folder onto an M-DISK DVD and store it off site. I know that this doesn't answer your question about cloud storage. Does iCloud not store your OS? Have you looked at Carbonite?

 

[Colonel Panik]

I guess I could do a scheduled rsync cloud backup of my time machine disk. The dev environment doesn't change that often, and the docs I work on are always in Dropbox or a repository...
I've suggested a Developer Edition to BackBlaze.

 

[HDFan]

Have you removed all of the Backblaze exclusion lists for folders, and file types? I.E., what if you remove Applications from the exclusion list under the "Exclusions" tab?

 

[Colonel Panik]

Unfortunately one can't change the default excluded folders. That's set in stone (their support told me).

 

[chown33]

You could backup the excluded folders to a local disk-image, ensuring that the disk-image is in a location that will be backed-up normally by BackBlaze. If you already understand rsync well enough to write a command-line to do this, then that's a simple route to take. Otherwise I suggest Carbon Copy Cloner, which uses rsync to do its copying, and has a nice interface that will let you set things up easily.

I'd use a sparse-bundle disk-image type, because then only band-files that actually change will be copied over. It will also only occupy as much disk space as needed to hold data and directories, regardless of what volume-size you create the sparse-bundle for (e.g. 1 TB).

 

[Markoth]

You can use Time Machine to back up over the internet, actually. You have to set everything up manually, but it works quite well once everything's in place. Doing so securely can be tricky, but it's quite doable. Depending on whether you care about leaking this info by sending it in cleartext over the internet, you can decide how much security means to you.

Personally, I'm using Time Machine in this fashion for my development laptop, as well as an rsync/ZFS snapshot script for an incremental backup solution on a Fedora server I control.