Using Apple Backup quickpicks?

[willismorse]

I just purchased SuperDuper and am already having a warmer and fuzzier feeling than I did with Apple's Backup.

The one thing that I miss from Backup, however, is the concept of Quickpicks. Essentially, they are each just a list of directories/files to back up. It's really nice to be able to build up multiple scheduled backup scripts that are collections of quickpicks.

What's especially interesting are the ones that specify the various user data sets. Since they're created by Apple, they seem to contain more complete descriptions of data locations than you might come up with on your own.

Take the Address book quickbook, for example. Here's the heart of it:

"Graft Paths" = (
            {
                doNotCrossFilesystemBoundaries = 1; 
                pattern = "~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AddressBook.plist"; 
            }, 
            {
                doNotCrossFilesystemBoundaries = 1; 
                pattern = "~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook"; 
            }, 
            {
                doNotCrossFilesystemBoundaries = 1; 
                pattern = "~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AddressBook.abd.plist"; 
            }, 
            {doNotCrossFilesystemBoundaries = 1; pattern = "~/Library/Addresses"; }, 
            {
                doNotCrossFilesystemBoundaries = 1; 
                pattern = "~/Library/Preferences/AddressBookMe.plist"; 
            }
        );

It seems to be enumerating 5 different places your Address book data might be spread over. Maybe that's just a union of all the places different versions of OS X have put this data, but I'm not sure how I'd find this sort of thing on my own.

Also, there are a fair number of quickpicks for 3rd party software products now.

The format looks pretty straightforward, although I haven't found a schema for it yet.

Some people who are doing things with it:

http://www.johnhugg.com/quickpicks/
http://www.wishingline.com/notebook/...es/2005_09.php

[dnanian]

Copy Scripts are basically just like Quick Picks, William. But -- there's honestly little point in doing this. We seriously suggest that you always use "Backup - all files". That'll get address book and everything else, and update it really quickly: you don't need to be selective, because space is cheap... but your data isn't.

Make sense?

(In the QuickPick you presented, they backed up the various parts of Address Book's data -- its preferences (x3) and the data itself (x1).)

[willismorse]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Copy Scripts are basically just like Quick Picks, William. But -- there's honestly little point in doing this. We seriously suggest that you always use "Backup - all files". That'll get address book and everything else, and update it really quickly: you don't need to be selective, because space is cheap... but your data isn't.

Make sense?

(In the QuickPick you presented, they backed up the various parts of Address Book's data -- its preferences (x3) and the data itself (x1).)

Sure, I'd use this in addition to a full backup. Backing up to an iDisk or any kind of networked drive, or into a disk image for burning onto optical disk is another safety net. But bandwidth and space limitations mean I have to do very selective subsets. Backup has a "Personal Data" set that I was doing to my iDisk daily, which was a good compromise for me.

Anyway, I just thought it might nice to leverage off Apple and other's work itemizing these sets. I haven't looked at the copy scripts yet, maybe it's easy to just convert quickpicks to copy scripts.

Thanks,
- Will

[dnanian]

It's pretty easy, yes. In this case, you'd choose "Exclude all files" in the 2nd tab, and then add the three files listed into the 3rd with "Copy".