Backing up and restoring OS X partition on a PC

[Gantlett]

Hello everyone

 

I'm trying to back up my OS X system partition installed on my PC (Uphuck 10.4.9 v1.3 on a P4 2.0GHz and a 120GB drive).

 

I'm using Acronis True Image Home 11 and Workstation 9 (two different vsrions of True Image).

 

Since True Image is a PC program it does not support HFS/HFS+.

 

However, it backs up the entire HD and restoring works just fine.

 

The problem is that since the program doesn't read HFS/HFS+ partitions it will only back up the entire drive, regardless of the data inside it, including free space.

 

This leaves me with a 120GB back up file of a drive that only uses about 10GB of space...

 

Does anyone know a PC backup program that recognizes HFS/HFS+?

I've googled, but couldn't find one.

 

Thanks a lot,

Gant.

[hecker]

Does anyone know a PC backup program that recognizes HFS/HFS+?

I've googled, but couldn't find one.

That's really sad.

 

Use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper.

[Gantlett]

Thank you, but I don't think you understand my problem.

 

The programs you so kindly suggested work on the MACINTOSH platform. I'm trying to back up a Mac partition on a PC platform.

 

Restoring a system partition requires booting into a backup environment (a separate OS).

 

Or am I missing something here?

[A Nonny Moose]

You can't backup an HFS+ partition because Windows cannot read or write to it.

 

First, you'll need to spend money to get MacDrive and then you can worry about spending even more money for the backup software.

[CheeseCake]

I use norton ghost 11 (dos version on a usb flash drive) to backup the osx partition.

 

Ghost can recognize hfs+ but it cannot distinguish occupied space from free space on it either, which means if you don't fill 0s to free space marked by hfs+, the size of backup file will be terribly huge.

 

However, you can zero-out deleted files on hfs+ via osx's disk utility (erase --- erase free space).

 

The gho generated for tiger (with lots of applications) is about 1.4GB for a 20GB hfs+ partition with 3.2GB occupied, 2.2GB for leopard with 5.2 occupied. Both will take about 10-11 minutes to backup and 7-8 min to restore. (high compression)

 

BTW, it is recommended to use monolingual or xslimmer to remove unused languages and architectures, which usually will free about 1Gb of disk space depending on your configuration and software installed.

[Gantlett]

Thanks a lot guys.

 

So CheeseCake, you say Ghost actually compresses your HFS+ partition? That's something TrueImage doesn't do (although it compresses Windows partitions).

 

I'm not worried about unused languages and apps - minimizing my image from 120GB to 5-10GB is enough for me

 

The zeroing out idea sounds like exactly what I need, the only question is would it make any difference for TrueImage (since those zeros too are part of the drive...). I don't know if TrueImage can distinguish between logical and physical partitions for HFS/HFS+. Gonna look into it.

 

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A Nonny Moose - I already have MacDrive, but it only lets me mount Mac partitions, not back them up.

What backup software do you suggest?

 

Thanks again,

Gantlett.