Although I have a unix background, I like the fact that Apple’s OSX is made in such a way you don’t have to know or care what goes under under the hood. Simplicity rules. But sometimes simple solutions get trapped in their own simplicity.

I work on a Macbook Pro. I have a 1TB Nas attached to my airport network. So I want to backup to that Nas. I like Time Machine. But now I fell in a hole. The first initial backup TM wants to make is over 90GB, which would take quite a long time to do. Not realistic, to me.

Other backup programs are inefficient as well. Actually, I want the functionality provided by TM, but smarter. So I decided to make use of rsync through the Automator. And the fun is, I didn’t even have to write the rsync script - one is available for download as automator action. It’s the simples one I need and use, made to sync two folders.

I setup a /backup folder and made the automator script sync my homedir and the /backup folder. As soon as the task has finished, I will move the /backup folder to my Nas and point the script to that new location. Job done. The initial big backup will be fast because it’s on the local harddisk, but all other backups will be on my network storage.

I tried to trick TM into doing this, but it was made smart and won’t backup to the local harddisk :(. But this solution works perfectly!