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How do YOU back your machine up?


BeatBlaster
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Hey everyone,

 

I'm basically looking for the best, easiest means of cloning my SL drive to another backup hard drive I have installed in my machine. Both drives are SATA drives. On my 10.5 install I just use CarbonCopyCloner (CCC) to clone the disk from one drive to another then I use Chameleon to boot either drive. Can the same be done with 10.6 or do I need to install PC EFI v10.1 + Chameleon2 onto the backup 10.6 hard drive too? Do YOU have a better way of getting the job done? The goal is to be able to boot into the backup drive when necessary. You know how it goes ;)

 

Thanks all!

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Hey everyone,

 

I'm basically looking for the best, easiest means of cloning my SL drive to another backup hard drive I have installed in my machine. Both drives are SATA drives. On my 10.5 install I just use CarbonCopyCloner (CCC) to clone the disk from one drive to another then I use Chameleon to boot either drive. Can the same be done with 10.6 or do I need to install PC EFI v10.1 + Chameleon2 onto the backup 10.6 hard drive too? Do YOU have a better way of getting the job done? The goal is to be able to boot into the backup drive when necessary. You know how it goes :)

 

Thanks all!

 

 

Only thing I've ever found that works is already having a second copy installed on another drive and using Disk Utility to back up, using the restore option, just restore your working installation to an different drive. You can then use that same utility to reinstall if you ever have issues, however, it won't boot unless you reinstall chameleon on it.

 

 

 

So after you restore, you still in an install CD that has Chameleon on it, reinstall Chameleon, and it will boot. Thats the only thing I have ever got working but it takes a second, working OSX installation to do.

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Only thing I've ever found that works is already having a second copy installed on another drive and using Disk Utility to back up, using the restore option, just restore your working installation to an different drive. You can then use that same utility to reinstall if you ever have issues, however, it won't boot unless you reinstall chameleon on it.

 

 

 

So after you restore, you still in an install CD that has Chameleon on it, reinstall Chameleon, and it will boot. Thats the only thing I have ever got working but it takes a second, working OSX installation to do.

 

 

It's funny you say that cause this is very similar to the first method I used to employ when I first got into all this OSx86 goodness. I would install Leopard on 2 hard drives and then use OSx86 Tools to install PC EFI v9 onto each drive. Afterwards, I would be able to enter either "80" or "81" and then be able to boot into either drive.

 

Just last night before I got to the SL installing I got curious and wiped all my drives then I installed just Leopard (10.5) using the boot132 CD, downloaded CCC, cloned my new Leopard install to the second drive and then rebooted using the boot132 CD. To my amazement, I was able to boot into either drive. Granted, I didn't have Chameleon/PC EFI installed on either drive but it freakin' worked. So that's what led me to create this thread; to see what the rest of the world is up to in regards to cloning their Snow Leopard drives.

 

I think I'm going to just clone over my SL drive to the second hard drive, install PC EFI v10.1 onto the spare then reboot and try to boot the spare via Chameleon. Unfortunately, I have to wait until I get home from work to do this. I'll report back later with results.

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You don't say?? :rolleyes: Cool. Nice to see someone else having success with CCC. Did you need to install PC EFI on your backup to make it bootable or was just cloning the data over enough to get the job done? I'm thinking you would need to have EFI installed on the spare drive but I'm not 100% certain.

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Time Machine only on the hack. I have three drives installed here with 10.5.7, 10.6.8 and 10.8.0 All capable of booting, even my Time Machine drive :D

 

 

DUDE! Apple legal is gonna come looking for you over that copy of 10.8 you have!! :D lol ANYWAYS!!! COOL!!! Alright now I'm feeling confident about some backup goodness. So, CCC and TM. Been a while since I used Time Machine but it looks like I may have to give it another look see.

 

Thanks for everyone's input. I really, REALLY appreciate it!

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OK so I finally got home from work and decided I would:

 

- download CCC

- clone SL drive to backup drive

 

All goes well until about 1:30 into the process then I get hit with a KP. I tried to run CCC again - same thing; KP.

 

SO! I'm not sure if this is because CCC doesn't like SL (which I doubt if SticMAC is having success with it under SL) or if it's got something to do with my setup but I will have to investigate that later. For now, I will use Time Machine and see how that works instead......

 

OK so I run a Time Machine backup and get a KP during that too! wth? I'm starting to think I can't run a backup of my Snow Leopard install? Well that's BS. There has to be a way to get this done so I've attached 2 screen shots to this post of both KPs, the 1 during CCC and the other during Time Machine backup job. If anyone has any ideas please let me know. For now, Google is my best friend.

 

Thanks again.

post-395825-1252024809_thumb.jpg

post-395825-1252024820_thumb.jpg

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Well I think I figured out one piece of the puzzle. My SL drive needed to be repaired (wrong number of files and folders being reported). So I got that all fixed up and decided to run CCC again and was met with another KP. It's attached to this post. Damn. Anybody have any ideas? I followed d00m42's guide to a T so I'm not sure where the problem is.

post-395825-1252027971_thumb.jpg

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There is a specific new CCC for SL the old one doesn't work so well, the new one give some minor errors but I have found the cloning normally goes without a hitch! You other problem is of course to get Chameleon installed as it requires a Leopard installation to install and does NOT work in Snow!

 

I know it is tedious but I keep a copy of a bootable Leopard on a 80GB HDD JUST to run Chameleon and copy over the boot file!(sad isn't it) :)

 

SticMAC

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?? I do have Chameleon installed. And PC EFI. They are on my SL hard drive. Yeah I need to get 10.5 reinstalled as I blew it away to start testing the cloning of the SL drive. My main problem here is that I can't seem to get a full backup to run using either CCC or Time Machine. They both just bomb out in the middle of the backup process. So that's 2 processes, backupd and rsync, that run but then stop running.

 

Am I making sense? I think I might be confused as to what you're trying to say in your last post. ?? ^_^

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Man I'm getting way too used to installing 10.5/6 from scratch but at least I'm learning a ton about how this all works along the way. I'm going to take d00m42's guide, add a few twists to it and reinstall SL to see if I keep getting these random KP's during backups. I may as well just start writing a guide of my own while I'm at it.

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The best thing is to have always an usb drive partitioned with GUID with chameleon 2 installed and basic kekts, so you don't need to reinstall the bootloader after cloning a partition.

 

This is a very good point and I now understand why it's best this way. Long story short, I ended up starting over from scratch. I'm happy to report that my machine is now perfect including the backups! I'm not exactly sure what the cause of the issues were last time but this new install is working very well. d00m42 was right - you need patience! I ended up installing Chameleon back onto my SL drive but now I'm thinking "what if that drive goes down?" I guess there really is always room for improvement ;)

 

Anyway, thanks for everyone's help!

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