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Fetch’s Mirroring Feature
Fetch has the ability to "mirror" the contents of one folder (or disk, for that matter) to another, meaning that it copies the contents of the folder to another folder. Normally, one folder is on your local disk (your computer’s hard drive) while the other is on the remote disk (the FTP server’s hard drive). Although either location can be the source (the folder from which files are being copied) or the destination (the folder to which files are being copied), when you’re backing up your hard disk, the local disk is the source disk and the remote disk is the destination.
What’s neat about the mirror feature is that it does not copy every single file in the source location to the destination location. Instead, it compares the two and copies only the files that don’t exist at the destination, or that have been changed since the last time they were copied to the destination. So unless the source folder has significant changes since the last time it was mirrored to the destination, the mirroring process should be quick and use very little bandwidth.
To set up the backup, set up the mirror feature by following these steps:
- Launch Fetch.
- Choose Remote > Mirror. The Mirror dialog box appears (see Figure
1).
Figure 1 Fetch’s Mirror dialog box, before the source and destination locations have been set.
- On the left side of the dialog box, make sure that the Local button is selected; then click Choose on that side of the dialog box.
- Use the resulting Open dialog (see Figure 2) to locate and select the folder
you want to back up.
Figure 2 Use this dialog box to choose a location on your disk.
- Click Choose. The path appears in the Mirror dialog box.
- On the right side of the Mirror dialog box, click Choose.
- Use the Connection dialog that appears (see Figure 3) to set up the
connection to your FTP server. The settings should include the hostname or IP
address of the server, your username and password, and the path to the
destination folder. It’s very important that you also select the Add to
Keychain checkbox if you want to reuse the mirror information in the future.
I’ll get to that in a minute.
Figure 3 Fetch’s connection dialog, filled in with information for my server connection.
- Click OK. The remote server location information is added to the Mirror dialog box.
- In the middle of the dialog box are two transfer direction buttons. Make sure that the top one, which indicates that files will be copied from the local disk to the remote disk, is selected. This setting indicates that the local disk is the source disk and the remote disk is the destination disk. This step is very important!
- If you want the destination disk to include only those files that are in the
source disk when you use the mirror feature, you can select the Delete Stray
Items at Destination checkbox. However, I don’t recommend doing this
unless you’re sure that you want to delete existing files at the
destination.
At this point, the Mirror dialog box should look something like Figure 4.
Figure 4 The Mirror dialog box, set up to copy the contents of a local folder to a folder on an FTP server.
- Click Save.
- Use the resulting Save As dialog to name the mirror instructions document
and choose a disk location for it (see Figure 5). Be sure to turn on the Mirror
Automatically When Opened option—that tells Fetch to use the instructions
to mirror the source folder automatically when you open the document. Then click
Save.
Figure 5 Fetch’s Save As dialog.
- Choose Fetch > Quit Fetch to quit Fetch.
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