Tag: backup

Backing iOS up to a secondary drive on macOS

So my wife got a new iPhone yesterday which of course means me playing tech support and me backing the old one up and restoring onto the new one. My wife has a Mac Air with a somewhat limited internal drive to there wasn’t enough space to back up the old iPhone (128gb). Easy I thought! I’ll just move the iTunes library folder to an external USB drive and the backup will go there. Wrong! The backups are not kept in the iTunes library so that didn’t work.

After a little research it turned out that iOS backups are kept in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup with each backup being a folder in that directory. Hmmm… Maybe a synlink would work? Oh yes! So here’s what I did:

  1. Delete older backups from iTunes using Preferences/Devices
  2. Quit iTunes
  3. Break open a terminal
  4. Move to the folder containing the Backup folder: 
    cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync
  5. Remove the folder (now empty): 
    rm -rf Backup
  6. Create a symbolic link (synlink) to the directory on the external drive to hold the backup (here the USB drive is called MM): 
    ln -s /Volumes/MM/iOSbackups/ ./Backup
  7. Open iTunes and backup the iPhone and restore onto the new iPhone
  8. Quit iTunes
  9. Reverse the process (after having ejected the USB drive): 
    cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/MobileSync
rm Backup
mkdir Backup
  10. Done!

 

Backup for IBM Connections communities

An excellent and a bit overdue addition to IBM Connections is better control over backup of communities. We’re not talking fine grained control and integration with e.g. Tivoli Storage Manager but rather backup to and restore from ZIP-files. The asset has been added to the Greenhouse catalog and is described in the New backup & restore tool for IBM Connections Communities post on the Synch.rono.us blog.

Amazon web services – amazing!

I just got a billing statement for my usage of the Amazon S3 storage service and it’s amazing! Well not the actual statement but the contents of the statement. The statement shows that I have 5.36 USD due.

I uploaded around 3,5 GB of data to my account but what I’m paying for is not the storage costs but the transfer costs. Bandwidth is more expensive than storage! Of the amount due is 0.54 USD for storage and 1.08 USD is tax. The rest is transfer and bandwidth.

For those interested I’m using Amazon S3 for backup of my laptop (and with the problems I have been having with my laptop disk lately I’m happy I’m backing up once a day). To make Amazon S3 look like a drive and to handle the actual (scheduled) backup I’m using Jungledisk which I can highly recommend.

Update: Just saw an article on developerWorks on Amazon S3.