I need to improve my backup process for my macbook, running snow leopard. I want a solid bare-metal restore mechanism that won't skip over files (updated since last backup, of course). I also dare to hope to perform this feat via something that is reasonably automated each evening.
I currently boot the mac to an external HDD running linux, that runs a simple shell script which performs a raw block copy (I also have some partitions which contain solaris, windows and some more operating systems), to insure I have a bootable backup and the virtual machines are copied. Then when the backup script completes, it issues a reboot which then goes back into OS X. Time machine then handles the rest.
To restore, plan is to do a raw dd volume copy from the latest image backup, then let time machine perform a restore on top of it. This won't cut it. Much to my surprise, time machine
This doesn't cut it, first it is a pain, secondly, time-machine doesn't back everything up to begin with. So what I would like to do is carve out an iSCSI target on a RAID protected server (running solaris), and backup to that. I can script something that can handle the raw partitions as the virtual operating systems will be shut down before they are backed up, so no risk of missing anything or dealing with open files.
Any suggestions on a commercial product, or a URL to a how-to that addresses configuring apple's time machine to get raw partitions, use iSCSI, and providing control to get it to back up files that it normally skips?