Installing client on Mac OS 10.14 / Mojave fails

[uroni]

@andre

• Somehow integrating with APFS snapshots
• Low priority: Finding out how APFS sparse files work and supporting those

I believe it’s a hard path to take for UrBackup because it’s too platform specific, and it would require a substantial effort to maintain. I’d be better off skipping the “protected” folders of Mac OS (like /bin /sbin and a few others) because they are supposed to be handled by the OS install and update mechanisms (that’s why even Mac OS updates have to boot in a special mode to process those regions, then the Mac boots normally again).

The most important dirs to backup, I think, are /etc /Library and of course /Users. That won’t allow immediate restore of whole systems, but at least we don’t lose user data and configurations.

It’s not about system backups. In general, if you backup files without snapshots you have a chance that they are currently undergoing changes and are inconsistent (which makes those backups worthless). Think of the database file of you mail application for example.
If there is a command line tool to create APFS snapshots it’s as simple as creating a snapshot script such as this: urbackup_backend/linux_snapshot/btrfs_create_filesystem_snapshot at 2.4.x · uroni/urbackup_backend · GitHub