Keep in mind that this method does not do the fancy going back in time, or is even a full backup of the hard-drive. Chances are that you probably don’t need those anyway. If things do go sour, I normally prefer to start with a clean base system and reinstall essential apps and then copy things (like documents and preferences) over from my backup.

I’m going to assume that you know your way around a unix system and can use the Terminal on your mac. If you don’t, leave a comment if you have any questions. Also, these instructions assume you’re backing up to a locally mounted volume, but since rsync is so flexible, you can backup to almost any computer on your LAN or the internet.

rsync -avzE --quiet --exclude-from=.exclude ~/ /Volumes/vultures/Backups

I’m using the -E parameter to include extended attributes from OSX with the backup as well - this is useful when backing up a mac. Also, I use the –quiet option because I really don’t need the output. If you’re the verbose kind, use -P (which does the same as –progress and –partial) to see the whole thing go through.

I also give rsync an exclude file where I list directories and file name patterns that I want to ignore when backing up. This is mainly so rsync doesn’t backup my iTunes music library, Movies, Downloads or spotlight indexes. Those are the things that I really don’t need. You’ll likely have to finetune this file for your own setup, but it should be pretty easy (and when it’s not, refer to the examples on rsync’s man page). Here’s my own exclude file (.exclude on my home directory):

/Music/
/Movies/
.DS_Store/
/Downloads/
/Documents/Virtual Machines/
*/.Trash

With that out of the way, there’s a few obvious ways to improve this backup scheme. One of those is to make rsync keep several backups, or to automate the backing up process using cron. I’ll leave that to your own exploring, but keep in mind that this may be a lot better than Time Machine if you just need the safety of knowing you’re all backed up without the pain of having a hard drive fully dedicated to it.

Do you backup some other way? Do share your thoughts in the comments!

Anyway, Dion delivers again by scoring an interview with the Sproutcore developer that goes into a bit of detail about the why’s and how’s of the framework itself. You should go have a listen if javascript, thick clients or building (oh beautiful) web-based applications is your kind of game.

I don’t know about other platforms, but I can tell you my story of love and hate with Firefox on the Mac: Firefox 2 has always been on my computer, even though I was using Safari for its speed, stability and OS integration. Now I’m going back: Firefox 3 is a lot faster and stable, not to mention I can go back to using proper keyboard shortcuts (something Safari lacks, particularly for tab controls).

Being a web developer, the browser is a key tool in the work I do every day. Along with Firefox 3, there are a bunch of useful extensions you can install to work on the web. The next few paragraphs highlight some of those.

Tools of the trade

- Firebug is a swiss-army knife that allows you to: inspect specific nodes on a page, change the code and css of the page on the fly, test Javascript code in a console and see network debug information for each request. Get Firebug from the project’s page. (I’m using the 1.2 beta and loving it).

- Yahoo!’s YSlow relies on Firebug and highlights potential problems with your page, app or service, as well as tips on how to solve them. If you’ve read “Building scalable websites”, this is the tool that goes with the book. Learn more about the project and download it here.

- Live HTTP Headers let’s you see the headers exchanged between your browser and the web server for each request on a given session (i.e.: html, images, CSS files, etc…). Get it here

- Tamper data is what you need if you want to mess around forms after being submitted but just before being POSTed to the server. Give it a spin if you’re into tampering your requests.

- Web Developer used to be the de facto extension when developing for the web. It has been replaced with Firebug’s features but if all that you want is outline certain elements or resize the window, this may still be the right tool for you. You can download it here.

Enjoy your weekend!

- (CPData)dataOfType:(CPString)aType error:({CPError})anError
{
    var dictionary = [CPDictionary dictionary],
        data = [CPData dataWithString:@""],
        archiver = [[CPKeyedArchiver alloc] initForWritingWithMutableData:data];

Luckily my friend Dion over at Ajaxian did, and scored an interview with the 280North guys about Objective-J, Cocoa and Capuccino. It’s a pretty interesting listen (it’s a podcast), so make time for it if you enjoy this kind of brain-munching runtime-porting stuff. Now you do have to excuse me while I wrap my head around all these brackets in my browser window.

It’s pretty helpful stuff if you happen to be offline often when working on things you want to test out in an environment that resembles your final production infrastructure. I’m telling you, these EY guys know their stuff.