How do you clone or back up your system drive before a Tiger install?

[Kevin Monahan]

Use Disk Utility’s “Restore” function. Very simple!

Kevin Monahan
Author – Motion Graphics and Effects in Final Cut Pro
fcpworld.com

[Phil]

Can you just copy the entire drive and paste it to an external drive, as a back up? Will restore in disk utility do this?

Dual 867, 2G RAM /
OS 10.3.7 / QT 6.5.2 / FCP 4.1.1

[Steven Gonzales]

A lot of people swear by Carbon Copy Cloner, though I haven’t tried it:

https://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

[Damon Casantini]

I’ve used Carbon Cloner very successfully in backing up many a client’s hard drive before working on their system. I swear by it as it’s a very easy and quick program. When you do back up make sure to have the program back up everything and to be on the safe side under preferences choose make bootable that way if you need to you can boot off the firewire drive that you cloned to.

Damon

Advanced Systems Integration
Applied Video Technology
http://www.appliedvideo.com
Apple Pro Video Technican
Avid ACSR: Windows

[Tony]

Phil,

There is only one solution I trust and live by and that is Carbon Copy Cloner. It is shareware software which you can download for free. A donation is requested which you can decide to contribute.

CCC allow making a bootable clone of your main drive which makes it great for backing up an previous version of OSX and then “testing” out the latest update from Apple (which in some cases will screw up your life).

Whenever Apple releases a new update or OS I never upgrade without making a clone of my boot drive.

Do a google search for Carbon Copy Cloner for the website.

Tony Salgado

[Mitchji]

[Phil] “Can you just copy the entire drive and paste it to an external drive, as a back up? Will restore in disk utility do this?”

Hi Phil,

Making a copy in the finder will NOT work.

Using the Restore Tab in Disk Utility “will work”. Very simple to use. Click “Erase Destination” and DU will do a checksum verification when its complete.

I put quotes around the will work for this reason. I used the Restore Tab in DU to clone boot partitions at least 10 times. Always worked flawlessly. Running Diskwarior upon completion never gave any errors (CCC and SuperDuper do result in minor DW errors). Then on one partition I used DU and I aborted with an error message and the source partition was hosed. I had to run Disk Warrior to repair the original partition. I then used Super Duper to clone the partition without any problems. Made me slightly wary of the Restore Tab in DU.

Best Wishes,

Mitch

[Kevin Monahan]

There is only one solution I trust and live by and that is Carbon Copy Cloner.

Ahem…..
CCC is not ready for Tiger. And why spend the dough? Just use Disk Utility. Disk Warrior is not good to go with Tiger either, so Disk Utility is the most reliable way to do this function.

From the CCC website:
If you’ve upgraded to Tiger you may have noticed that CCC does not seem to work. Apple updated the authentication sceme of AppleScript Studio (yea!) and there’s a little bit of work to be done to get that part of CCC working again. I am planning an update to CCC but I do not currently have an ETA as I have some additional features and a large QA matrix. In the meantime, keep in mind that you can use the Disk Utility application to clone one disk to another as well as to create a disk image of your hard drive.

Kevin Monahan
Author – Motion Graphics and Effects in Final Cut Pro
fcpworld.com

[Phil]

Can Disk Utility make a bootable clone of your system drive?

Thanks

Dual 867, 2G RAM /
OS 10.3.7 / QT 6.5.2 / FCP 4.1.1

[Tom Wolsky]

I have used SuperDuper for the last few years and have never had a problem with it. Simple interface, good options.