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I'm looking for some OS X Lion software that can periodically backup certain folders.

I can't use Time Machine because the storage disk is NTFS and I'm using Paragon to r/w on it.

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Just don't. You want your backups to actually work, don't you? Also, NTFS does not support directory hard links, a concept quite fundamental to how Time Machine backups are stored. – Daniel Beck♦ Sep 24 '11 at 16:29
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@Daniel: NTFS does, however, support file hard links, and it is possible to link each file separately to conserve space in a similar way. (rsnapshot does that on Unixes.) – grawity Sep 24 '11 at 17:54
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@DanielBeck: You need to stop while you are ahead. . .msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/…. Keep in mind NTFS was created to complete with UNIX, so it is POSIX compliant. – surfasb Sep 24 '11 at 21:31
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Access denied is because, just like in OSX, you need admin privs. No need to answer the API question because you never bothered to read the link, which answers your question. – surfasb Sep 25 '11 at 10:17
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@surfasb: Daniel commented on directory hard links, which neither Windows nor POSIX allow. (Windows junctions are more like symlinks. Linux could support it, but no one's implemented it yet.) Mac OS X 10.5 is the only one that allows hardlinking directories from user-space, and the feature has been added specifically for Time Machine. – grawity Sep 25 '11 at 23:31
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2 Answers

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If you're not looking for any fancy features that NTFS does not have, I'd basically go with Carbon Copy Cloner, which is free.

Its features include:

  • Incremental backup of files and folders to external hard drives, network or disk images
  • Scheduled backups (hourly, weekly, etc.)

Given a proper NTFS driver, it should work with NTFS drives.

As Lukasa pointed out, adding a cron job that runs rsync on a regular basis would also do the trick, albeit with a less user-friendly approach due to lacking GUI.

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Copied from an Ask Different answer to Enabling Time Machine for a USB HDD with NTFS:

Backup to NTFS

If you wish to use Time Machine in Lion or greater with an NTFS volume – and if you have a write-enabled driver for NTFS:

  • with tmutil you can configure Time Machine to back up to a sparse bundle disk image, the .sparsebundle stored on NTFS.

In some situations you may find that Time Machine simply offers to use an NTFS volume. This may occur if, say, a write-enabled driver for NTFS is installed before a physical disk with NTFS is introduced to OS X.

Restore from NTFS

OS X can read NTFS, and so should be able to restore from a .sparsebundle in this environment.

Whether Recovery OS is similarly prepared to read from NTFS and restore, I don't know.

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