Apple Backup is a POS

I love Apple products. So for me to call out an Apple product a POS is pretty remarkable. But Apple Backup (comes free with .mac service) is the worst backup software I have ever seen.

This software lets you back up your personal data as well as perference files and purchased iTunes music and so forth. The promise is great and I actually think it does a fine job doing the backup task. The problem comes when you try to restore the frickin' data. The Backup software basically chokes when there are many incremental back ups and more than a couple of tens of gigs of data involved. So when my wife's iBook's hard drive decided to die on her, Apple Backup made ist impossible to recover my wife's data. So what do I do?

If you look at the backup data there are three types of files, all of which are actually bundles. First you have .FullBackup documents, which get created when you execute a "full backup". In most cases, you then have .IncrementalBackup documents, which are collection of documents modified since the last time the Backup plan was run. In all cases, if you dig inside the bundle file, you'll find a sparseimage file, an image file that contains the original folder hierarchy of the backed up data.

Since I could not use Apple Backup, which hopefully is clever enough to understand all of the incremental backup history and recover all of the data backed up. Unfortunately, given the situation I can not confirm the validity of the software feature and I do not wish to deal with the software any more than I already have.

I did a little bit of look around and thinking to realize that all I have to do is recover the last full backup, then bring it up to date by syncing each incremental backup data against it. Using software such as psync or rsync, this can easily be achieved. As long as you run a sync (source = incremental backup, target = last full backup), taking each incremental backup in chronological order, by the time I sync the latest incremental backup against the full backup all of the data should come back.

I used RsyncX for the task (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/16814). RsyncX is a package of rsync, a great data synchronization software, with a Cocoa front end. Using the "Simple" interface and its "Update" mode, I realized this could easily be done. The only trouble now is to run the sync with 20+ sparseimages. This is gonna take me all night long... *sob*