Mac OS® X Tiger™ Unleashed

Performing System Backups

As much as all of us hate to do it, keeping a backup of your important applications and data is a crucial part of maintaining a Tiger system. Backups generally fall into two categories: full and incremental. A full backup is an exact duplicate of everything within your filesystem (or a branch thereof, such as /Users or /usr/local). From a full backup, you can quickly restore the state of all the backed-up files as they existed at the time the backup was made. Full backups are time-consuming (all files must be copied each time the backup is run) and cannot efficiently be used to store multiple versions of files over an extended period of time. If, for example, you want to have a copy of each day's updates to your file ...