DavidinCT Posted June 25, 2008 Share Posted June 25, 2008 I got my Leopard partition running great now. Just worried about what's happened to me in the past, so I want to make sure I have a full backup of the system. The problem is, the Leopard partition is only about 25gb, and the rest of the drives are NTFS (vista). I would like to backup to a DVD, so if it dies, I can just boot with a DVD, select restore, and in 10-20 min I am up and running. I do this on Vista/XP/2003 server with Acronis backup and it works pefect. I looking for a complete system backup (just the leopard partition). So, is it possable under Time Machine to backup to DVD ? I figure if the worse happens, I can boot with one of the install disks and restore it from there. If not, is there a better product that does this and works really well ? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/112542-backup-system-to-dvd/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boot Camp Posted June 25, 2008 Share Posted June 25, 2008 Well what you can do is save it to an external hard drive. So you would boot into a Kalyway disc, go into Disk Utility, select the your Leopard partition you want to backup, hit new image at the top and select your external hard drive as the spot you would like to save it (make sure you have enough room). Then if and when you want to restore your hard drive, just reinstall Kalyway or whatever you used and restore from your external hard drive, but you will have to reinstall EFI again, no biggie. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/112542-backup-system-to-dvd/#findComment-796533 Share on other sites More sharing options...
mtrog007 Posted June 25, 2008 Share Posted June 25, 2008 That's how you do it Boot Camp? Man i've been looking for a short and sweet answer FOREVER, thanks man. Oh what about the programs? Would it load the programs back on? (i.e. garageband, aperture, whatever) Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/112542-backup-system-to-dvd/#findComment-796536 Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidinCT Posted June 25, 2008 Author Share Posted June 25, 2008 Well what you can do is save it to an external hard drive. So you would boot into a Kalyway disc, go into Disk Utility, select the your Leopard partition you want to backup, hit new image at the top and select your external hard drive as the spot you would like to save it (make sure you have enough room). Then if and when you want to restore your hard drive, just reinstall Kalyway or whatever you used and restore from your external hard drive, but you will have to reinstall EFI again, no biggie. I don't have an external drive right now, that is why I am looking for a DVD option. So the question is, is there an option to back the system up (like can be done in Windows) then if the system fails, boot with the disk and restore the complete system, reboot then it's back the way it was with out any configuration or reinstalling the OS ? Looking for a "One Click restore" option..., Not sure if a 3rd party option is out there that will offer this... Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/112542-backup-system-to-dvd/#findComment-796656 Share on other sites More sharing options...
mtrog007 Posted June 25, 2008 Share Posted June 25, 2008 What do you mean by restore the complete system? Do you mean programs, everything? or just the os Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/112542-backup-system-to-dvd/#findComment-796771 Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidinCT Posted June 26, 2008 Author Share Posted June 26, 2008 What do you mean by restore the complete system? Do you mean programs, everything? or just the os Of course looking for both (files and complete system) but, in this case, I am only looking for a COMPLETE back up. To the point of, system dies, boot with a DVD, restore system from DVD, restart computer, system boots just like before the backup. In this case I want it to back up, system and all programs/settings. I just got my 10.5.3 install running really good, don't want to take a chance again... Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/112542-backup-system-to-dvd/#findComment-797536 Share on other sites More sharing options...
vaporATX Posted June 26, 2008 Share Posted June 26, 2008 Of course looking for both (files and complete system) but, in this case, I am only looking for a COMPLETE back up. To the point of, system dies, boot with a DVD, restore system from DVD, restart computer, system boots just like before the backup. In this case I want it to back up, system and all programs/settings. I just got my 10.5.3 install running really good, don't want to take a chance again... I've never even attempted this because none of my systems (OSX,Vista, XP) will fit on a DVD. Even my compressed images are 100GB+ with all programs, games, data, etc. All I can do is tell you how I do it in the hopes it might give you some ideas. I have a dedicated 750GB backup drive in my machine. I have a bootable OS X partition on this drive that I smart update with SuperDuper. This way I can save system state very fast and then basically mess with my main drive with impunity. If I frag the main install I just boot into the backup partition and smart update the main drive from the running backup. This saves a lot of time since it only has to replace the files that have changed. We're talking literally 30 secs or so and I can reboot back to my main drive in the state it was in before I screwed it up. Full restores using disk utility or acronis take too friggin' long (and in the case of my osx install wipe out efi necessitating a reinstall of that). This makes life so much easier if you do a lot of tinkering with osx86. The rest of the drive stores compressed images of my Vista, XP, Linux, etc installs and compressed archival backups of my OSx86 system. I also have a share on my home server that has a nightly incremental backup of the backup drive for extra security incase the backup drive fails while I'm messing with the main drive. When you figure you can get a 500GB drive these days for like 70-80 bucks it is, imho, well worth it. I know this didn't anwser your question... just some thoughts. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/112542-backup-system-to-dvd/#findComment-797611 Share on other sites More sharing options...
mtrog007 Posted June 26, 2008 Share Posted June 26, 2008 Dang vaporATX. That's exactly what I want to do, what you described that you do. Would you care to explain the process? Or is it just with super duper? Need partition types? Any help appreciated. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/112542-backup-system-to-dvd/#findComment-797966 Share on other sites More sharing options...
vaporATX Posted June 26, 2008 Share Posted June 26, 2008 You don't even have to have a secondary drive if you have enough space on the primary for a separate partition. If you are really pressed for space you can also use a sandbox so that only your system files and apps are copied to the backup leaving the user files (movies, music, data files, ect..) on the main partition and shared with the sandbox. I don't use this setup because I have plenty of disk space and don't want to use a bootloader like grub or Acronis Disk Director.* I just use the bios' boot drive selector. The way I have it setup is like this. The primary drive is the main OS X drive. This drive is partitioned as one big 500GB HFS+ partition with the Chameleon bootloader. The secondary drive is a 750GB that is for backups and a secondary boot drive for OS X. The size of the OS X partiton (named sysbackup) is set to the approximate size of the system and data disk usage on the main drive with some room from growth (about 320GB right now) and also has the Chameleon bootloader. This isn't critical if you use GUID since you can easily, quickly, and dynamically resize partitions non-destructively. The rest of the secondary drive is NTFS storage for storing images of the XP, Vista, Linux, and FreeBSD installs on the third drive. The third drive is a 500GB drive that contains XP, Vista, Linux, and FreeBSD installs accessed from a Grub bootloader. To backup OS X you simply startup SuperDuper and do a smart update from the primary drive main os x partition to the secondary drive sysbackup partition. The first time you do this it takes a while since all the files will have to be copied. Next time you do it it'll only backup what has changed and is very fast. Now let's say I'm messing with my main partition and I totally frag it with some new kexts or a system update and I don't feel like wasting a bunch of time in single user mode in terminal trying to fix it. Since I backed up to the secondary right before I started messing with it I simply boot into the sysbackup partition, do a smart backup (not a restore!) to the main partition from the seconday, and in a few minutes I'm right where I left off. No lengthy restore process to worry about, no reinstalling efi, all very slick and easy. Make sense? *Note: You can sandbox to a secondary drive, too. I just meant that I like to have full backups of all my user data on the secondary backup, so I don't sandbox. Also note that if you have both the main and secondary partitions on the same drive you will need a way to boot to the secondary since using the bios drive selector, of course, won't work. Note2: I don't use TimeMachine since I find it to be pretty useless for my purposes, but your time machine backup can share the same partition as the SuperDuper clone. Space permitting of course. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/112542-backup-system-to-dvd/#findComment-798044 Share on other sites More sharing options...
mtrog007 Posted June 26, 2008 Share Posted June 26, 2008 Definately, thanks man. That answered one of my few questions Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/112542-backup-system-to-dvd/#findComment-798057 Share on other sites More sharing options...
Poco Posted June 26, 2008 Share Posted June 26, 2008 I should try that. But not until I get a bigger drive. iPoco Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/112542-backup-system-to-dvd/#findComment-798124 Share on other sites More sharing options...
newbmac Posted June 27, 2008 Share Posted June 27, 2008 You don't even have to have a secondary drive if you have enough space on the primary for a separate partition. If you are really pressed for space you can also use a sandbox so that only your system files and apps are copied to the backup leaving the user files (movies, music, data files, ect..) on the main partition and shared with the sandbox. I don't use this setup because I have plenty of disk space and don't want to use a bootloader like grub or Acronis Disk Director.* I just use the bios' boot drive selector. The way I have it setup is like this. The primary drive is the main OS X drive. This drive is partitioned as one big 500GB HFS+ partition with the Chameleon bootloader. The secondary drive is a 750GB that is for backups and a secondary boot drive for OS X. The size of the OS X partiton (named sysbackup) is set to the approximate size of the system and data disk usage on the main drive with some room from growth (about 320GB right now) and also has the Chameleon bootloader. This isn't critical if you use GUID since you can easily, quickly, and dynamically resize partitions non-destructively. The rest of the secondary drive is NTFS storage for storing images of the XP, Vista, Linux, and FreeBSD installs on the third drive. The third drive is a 500GB drive that contains XP, Vista, Linux, and FreeBSD installs accessed from a Grub bootloader. To backup OS X you simply startup SuperDuper and do a smart update from the primary drive main os x partition to the secondary drive sysbackup partition. The first time you do this it takes a while since all the files will have to be copied. Next time you do it it'll only backup what has changed and is very fast. Now let's say I'm messing with my main partition and I totally frag it with some new kexts or a system update and I don't feel like wasting a bunch of time in single user mode in terminal trying to fix it. Since I backed up to the secondary right before I started messing with it I simply boot into the sysbackup partition, do a smart backup (not a restore!) to the main partition from the seconday, and in a few minutes I'm right where I left off. No lengthy restore process to worry about, no reinstalling efi, all very slick and easy. Make sense? *Note: You can sandbox to a secondary drive, too. I just meant that I like to have full backups of all my user data on the secondary backup, so I don't sandbox. Also note that if you have both the main and secondary partitions on the same drive you will need a way to boot to the secondary since using the bios drive selector, of course, won't work. Note2: I don't use TimeMachine since I find it to be pretty useless for my purposes, but your time machine backup can share the same partition as the SuperDuper clone. Space permitting of course. Regarding "do a smart backup (not a restore!) to the main partition from the seconday, and in a few minutes I'm right where I left off." That doesn't make sense. Why is it a smart backup instead of a restore from the backup OS to the primary OS install? Wouldn't you want to copy the files from your backup os to the primary? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/112542-backup-system-to-dvd/#findComment-798818 Share on other sites More sharing options...
vaporATX Posted June 27, 2008 Share Posted June 27, 2008 Regarding "do a smart backup (not a restore!) to the main partition from the seconday, and in a few minutes I'm right where I left off." That doesn't make sense. Why is it a smart backup instead of a restore from the backup OS to the primary OS install? Wouldn't you want to copy the files from your backup os to the primary? Makes perfect sense if you understand how the program works. It's an incremental imaging program, not a backup program. Think about it for a second. You image partition A to partition B. You screw up partition A, so you boot to partition B and smart backup (incremental image) partition B to partiton A. Now partition A is back to the way it was before your screwed it up and you boot back into it. If you did a full restore (like in disk utility for example) from partition B to partition A it would take a long time because you would be reimaging the entire partition instead of just the files that have changed. It may sound confusing, but it works and works very fast. If you don't understand this you'll just have to take my word for it... I've done this on Macs (and now hacks) for years. "Wouldn't you want to copy the files from your backup os to the primary?" Yes, that's exactly what you are doing. If you look at the backup and restore scripts in superduper you'll see what I mean. The restore script simply calls the "backup - all" script. They call it restore so as not to confuse non tech savvy users. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/112542-backup-system-to-dvd/#findComment-798928 Share on other sites More sharing options...
mtrog007 Posted June 27, 2008 Share Posted June 27, 2008 newbmac, vaporATX help me set up my computer for that. It makes perfect sense, atleast once you get the program. vaporATX explained all you can explain Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/112542-backup-system-to-dvd/#findComment-798962 Share on other sites More sharing options...
newbmac Posted June 28, 2008 Share Posted June 28, 2008 Makes perfect sense if you understand how the program works. It's an incremental imaging program, not a backup program. Think about it for a second. You image partition A to partition B. You screw up partition A, so you boot to partition B and smart backup (incremental image) partition B to partiton A. Now partition A is back to the way it was before your screwed it up and you boot back into it. If you did a full restore (like in disk utility for example) from partition B to partition A it would take a long time because you would be reimaging the entire partition instead of just the files that have changed. It may sound confusing, but it works and works very fast. If you don't understand this you'll just have to take my word for it... I've done this on Macs (and now hacks) for years. "Wouldn't you want to copy the files from your backup os to the primary?" Yes, that's exactly what you are doing. If you look at the backup and restore scripts in superduper you'll see what I mean. The restore script simply calls the "backup - all" script. They call it restore so as not to confuse non tech savvy users. Ahhh, thanks! Now I get it Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/112542-backup-system-to-dvd/#findComment-799440 Share on other sites More sharing options...
newbmac Posted June 30, 2008 Share Posted June 30, 2008 SuperDuper worked to clone the drive (a USB drive with 3 partitions) from partition 1 to partition 2 after a fresh install of Kaly 10.5.2 Then when I tried to do it again after doing the 10.5.3 combo update successfully I get this error: ACTION: Preserving Spotlight state on Backup | | Info | ......COMMAND => Disabling Spotlight search indexing on Backup | | Error | mdutil[383:10b] _CFGetHostUUIDString: unable to determine UUID for host. Error: 35 I tried to erase the backup drive and start over, still get this error. Any ideas? Ah the joy of a hackintosh Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/112542-backup-system-to-dvd/#findComment-801280 Share on other sites More sharing options...
DavidinCT Posted July 1, 2008 Author Share Posted July 1, 2008 I've never even attempted this because none of my systems (OSX,Vista, XP) will fit on a DVD. Even my compressed images are 100GB+ with all programs, games, data, etc. All I can do is tell you how I do it in the hopes it might give you some ideas. I have a dedicated 750GB backup drive in my machine. I have a bootable OS X partition on this drive that I smart update with SuperDuper. This way I can save system state very fast and then basically mess with my main drive with impunity. If I frag the main install I just boot into the backup partition and smart update the main drive from the running backup. This saves a lot of time since it only has to replace the files that have changed. We're talking literally 30 secs or so and I can reboot back to my main drive in the state it was in before I screwed it up. Full restores using disk utility or acronis take too friggin' long (and in the case of my osx install wipe out efi necessitating a reinstall of that). This makes life so much easier if you do a lot of tinkering with osx86. The rest of the drive stores compressed images of my Vista, XP, Linux, etc installs and compressed archival backups of my OSx86 system. I also have a share on my home server that has a nightly incremental backup of the backup drive for extra security incase the backup drive fails while I'm messing with the main drive. When you figure you can get a 500GB drive these days for like 70-80 bucks it is, imho, well worth it. I know this didn't anwser your question... just some thoughts. To clear up what I am looking for....Right now for Windows (vista/xp), I use Acronis Home backup, this allows me to backup the whole system to dvd, spanning between the DVDs, one of my machines took 5 DVDs, and it died. I boot up with disc 1, swiched discs a lot but, when it was done, it was a complete system restore from DVD..... Is there anything for MAC like this ? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/112542-backup-system-to-dvd/#findComment-803171 Share on other sites More sharing options...
newbmac Posted July 2, 2008 Share Posted July 2, 2008 To clear up what I am looking for....Right now for Windows (vista/xp), I use Acronis Home backup, this allows me to backup the whole system to dvd, spanning between the DVDs, one of my machines took 5 DVDs, and it died. I boot up with disc 1, swiched discs a lot but, when it was done, it was a complete system restore from DVD..... Is there anything for MAC like this ? Did you try and run SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner with a blank DVD-R in the computer? You might be able to specify that drive as the copy to,,, Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/112542-backup-system-to-dvd/#findComment-804477 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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