New in Tiger: Use Disk Utility to Back-Up Your Hard Drive
I haven’t backed up my G5 iMac since I upgraded it to Tiger. Now, you might see that as an advantage since my backup was still based on Panther. I might have, too, if I hadn't added lots of scanned pictures and several documents I really didn’t want to lose. So, I decided it was time to backup my G5 and let go of Panther once and for all.
My backup hard drive is a LaCie 120GB D2 External Firewire hard drive. It currently holds two equally sized partitions, just short of 60Gb each. One held a clone of my iMac’s Panther based hard drive. The other is awaiting a backup of my PowerBook, which is also running Tiger.
Normally, to backup the iMac, I simply hook up the LaCie drive to the iMac via a Firewire 400 cable, crank up a utility called Carbon Copy Cloner, and use Cloner to make a copy of the iMac’s boot drive on the LaCie. (Carbon Copy Cloner is an excellent donationware utility written by Mike Bombich of Bombich Software.) But I had seen enough on the web to know that my version of Cloner would not work, and a visit to the Bombich website confirmed it was not compatible with Tiger. How as I going to make the backup? Mike said it would be some time before he had a Tiger compatible version of his utility. But then he graciously reminded people they could use Disk Utility to clone a hard drive.
Huh?
Suspecting that Apple had added a new feature to Disk Utility, I cranked it up and, lo and behold, found it had a new “Restore” tab. Clicking on the tab yielded a window where I was told I could select the hard disks I wanted to use for the cloning operation by dragging them to slots marked “Source” and “Restore”. So, I dragged my iMac’s hard disk into the “Source” slot and the iMac’s backup partition on the La Cie drive (which showed up on my Desktop as a separate Firewire hard drive) into the “Restore” slot. Punching a little button marked “Restore” started the operation. Sure enough, the Utility began cloning my hard drive onto my external.
It took it an hour and a half or so to complete, but the operation went off without a hitch. I booted from the La Cie drive to test it; and it booted slower than the iMac's internal SATA hard disk but it did boot, and everything was there.
But, alas, what of poor Mike and his utility? Disk Utility works well, but it only clones whole partitions or drives. Carbon Copy Cloner does the same, but it also lets you select or deselect what you do or don’t want to install. And it seems faster. Mike’s not out of business.
Still, it’s nice to have cloning capability within Disk Utility itself.
My backup hard drive is a LaCie 120GB D2 External Firewire hard drive. It currently holds two equally sized partitions, just short of 60Gb each. One held a clone of my iMac’s Panther based hard drive. The other is awaiting a backup of my PowerBook, which is also running Tiger.
Normally, to backup the iMac, I simply hook up the LaCie drive to the iMac via a Firewire 400 cable, crank up a utility called Carbon Copy Cloner, and use Cloner to make a copy of the iMac’s boot drive on the LaCie. (Carbon Copy Cloner is an excellent donationware utility written by Mike Bombich of Bombich Software.) But I had seen enough on the web to know that my version of Cloner would not work, and a visit to the Bombich website confirmed it was not compatible with Tiger. How as I going to make the backup? Mike said it would be some time before he had a Tiger compatible version of his utility. But then he graciously reminded people they could use Disk Utility to clone a hard drive.
Huh?
Suspecting that Apple had added a new feature to Disk Utility, I cranked it up and, lo and behold, found it had a new “Restore” tab. Clicking on the tab yielded a window where I was told I could select the hard disks I wanted to use for the cloning operation by dragging them to slots marked “Source” and “Restore”. So, I dragged my iMac’s hard disk into the “Source” slot and the iMac’s backup partition on the La Cie drive (which showed up on my Desktop as a separate Firewire hard drive) into the “Restore” slot. Punching a little button marked “Restore” started the operation. Sure enough, the Utility began cloning my hard drive onto my external.
It took it an hour and a half or so to complete, but the operation went off without a hitch. I booted from the La Cie drive to test it; and it booted slower than the iMac's internal SATA hard disk but it did boot, and everything was there.
But, alas, what of poor Mike and his utility? Disk Utility works well, but it only clones whole partitions or drives. Carbon Copy Cloner does the same, but it also lets you select or deselect what you do or don’t want to install. And it seems faster. Mike’s not out of business.
Still, it’s nice to have cloning capability within Disk Utility itself.
posted by Andy Foster at
7:20 PM
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