scheduling an unattended backup on MacOSX server
 

I am looking for a backup solution for MacOSX server. We want to schedule backups on the server with SuperDuper!. Unfortunately the manually tells this is only possible when the user is logged in. We don't want to leave any user logged in to execute a backup. Is there any option to circumvent this limition? Apart from this it SuperDuper! suits our needs.

You have two choices. You can have an unprivileged user logged in with the screen locked (using a password protected screen saver), or you can install and schedule as root.

The first one is not an option. I don't want to login each time the server reboots to have backups.

Will the second option still work if the server reboots and nobody logs in as root user ?

Thanks.

Yes: at least in Panther and Tiger, root's crontab runs when no one is logged in, and root has access to the screen, so SD! will run.

Schedule SD! as root?
 

Are we talking about:
1. Logging in as the root user and creating a schedule in the SD! UI
2. Creating a launchd script to run as root or something else...?

I'm running Mac OS X Server 10.4.8

Logging in as the root user and creating a schedule.

It worked
 

No users were logged in and the log shows it ran as scheduled. Thanks.

Glad I could help, caleban, and that the solution worked. :)

Do OS X client backups still require a user logged in with the screen locked?

It's as it has "always" been.

This response is a bit too cryptic for me, unfortunately, and I really need to know the answer; I need an fully unattended backup solution.

• Can I schedule an unattended SD! backup on MacOSX 10.4.10 by scheduling it as "root"?
• For security reasons I really would prefer not to login as root; I don't currently have it enabled for interactive login sessions. Since it sounds like it's an issue with the cron job privileges, would either of the following work?
  • setup the backup schedule through the GUI client using my normal login; move the crontab entries to the root crontab manually; or
  • run the SD! gui client as root using sudo (not sure whether the difference between effective and actual uid would matter)

thanks,
Pete

You'll need to log in as root and schedule that way. You can then disable root login again.

After I scheduled a backup with SD! launched as root, I noticed that I could not unmount the destination FireWire drive. Even after I deleted its schedule. Even after I removed its cron task for the root account manually (why did the latter hang around after deleting the schedule?) with CronniX 3.0.2 <http://h775982.serverkompetenz.net:9080/abstracture_public/projects-en/cronnix/>.

Why won't something "let go" of my FireWire HD, what is that something, and how do I unmount it, so I can swap-out drives for my rotating backups?

Thanks!

I don't know: if you look at open file references with lsof, do you see what process has the drive active?

Thanks for the prompt reply!

That's a good idea to correlate a process with a volume, which ought drastically to narrow-down the possibilities for the culprit process.

I haven't yet gotten back over to the server site to try it yet, but when I ran lsof here, I was overwhelmed by its complexity: There's a "DEVICE" column, which seems the only candidate for which hard drive volume, but it has an unintelligible name, e.g., "14,2" instead of the actual name. Is there another Unix command that will cross-reference that obscure device number with the actual name of the hard drive partition?

I looked around the more user-friendly Activity Monitor, but couldn't find a way to show a drive volume column.

Are there any other GUI utilities that will do what I need to track down what's not letting me unmount a hard drive that's ever been scheduled with SD! ?

This occurred the very first time I installed SD! and set up a schedule. Am I the only person this has ever happened to?

Thanks!