Online Backups (and how to backup with Automator)

This article is part 2 of a series of Quite Useful articles on backups.

It’s always good to have an off-site backup. Online storage and broadband are getting cheaper and faster all the time, and the services are also getting easier to use.  I’ve reviewed my favourite online storage services here, and how to use Automator in Mac OS to schedule remote backups.

Online Storage Solutions

My preferred storage sites are box.net and Dropbox. Box.net works through a web interface, and they have widgets and mobile clients. It also works with WebDAV. This makes it possible to mount Box.net in Windows, Mac OS and Linux. I often use Transmit to connect to it through WebDAV rather than using the web interface.

Dropbox is slightly different. It has a web interface, but the product’s main focus is on a proprietary client for Mac, Windows and Linux. The client creates a folder and synchronises it whenever you add, change or delete a file. Right click a file then select Dropbox to get access to different revisions and a public URL for sharing. Quickly grabbing a public URL is one of the reasons I use Dropbox: it makes it easy to share screenshots of design work I’m doing.

Amazon S3: Jungle Disk

Jungle Disk is an online storage solution that uses Amazon S3 to store files. It works with Windows, Linux and Mac OS. It specifically supports automated backups, making it one of the easiest and simplest solutions.

Backup Clients

There’s dozens of backup programs out there. Most have an option to back up to a specific folder, so it doesn’t really matter whether this folder is remote or local.  This is the general technique for backing up with online storage: mount the remote service as a folder, then schedule an application to sync data to it.

To back up to Box.net in Mac OS select the Finder, then click Go from the menu and select Connect to to Server… . Enter http://www.box.net/dav and your email address and password.  Windows is very similar: open My Computer, click Tools, then Map Network Drive.

With Dropbox you can just select any folder within your Dropbox account to backup to.

SmartBackup is a cheap Mac OS backup app that could be used with Box.net and Dropbox. It costs $22 (about £14).

Adonec Backup is a Windows application designed to backup files to Box.net. It has a schedule feature, so it’ll back things up automatically.

Automator-Powered Backups with Box.net and Dropbox

A possibility for Mac OS or Linux is to take advantage of Box.net’s WebDAV support and back up documents with a client like Transmit. Transmit can be scripted through Apple’s Automator.

1. Add Box.net to Transmit (server: www.box.net, user name: your email address, remote path: dav)
2. Run Automator from Applications
3. Create a custom workflow
4. Search for Transmit, and select “Syncronize Files”. Drag it to the workflow area.
5. Select Favorite from the Connect To menu and then your Box.net account
6. Select the local path that you wish to backup, and enter a remote path for Box.net (the path must exist on Box.net, so create a new one if required)
7. Run the action to see if it works
8. Click Save As Plugin… from the File menu and save the automator action as an iCal Alarm
9. iCal will now have an entry with the name of your Automator action. Right click and select Get Info to schedule it

There aren’t any Dropbox Automator actions, but because of the way Dropbox works you can achieve the same thing by simply copying files to your Dropbox folder.

Scripting Backups

A command line WebDAV client is the easiest way of scripting backups to Box.net. I’ve used cadaver before and it’s fairly simple.

In Linux or Mac OS rsync and cron could be used to sync files to Dropbox. Similarly, Unison could be used in Windows.