Trying to get prepared so I won’t need answer fast. We’ve taken other steps to prevent issues; this is the last in the chain—the Worst Case Scenario.
Here are all the details, probably more than necessary:
I have a Western Digital drive in an external USB enclosure. I partitioned the drive, formatted one of the partitions as NTFS, and backed up a Win 7 machine there. I did not mount/format the second partition.
First, I want to connect the enclosure to the Mac, format the second partition, and run Timemachine to create a full system image/backup on it. Can someone point me in the right direction to have the Mac see and activate the partition?
If something goes horribly, horribly wrong, we can have the drive FedExed to us. For the PC, I created a system repair disc. What do I do for the Mac? It’s probably a simple terminology difference (and personal ineptitude—never discount ineptitude), but I’m not finding what I need to take with us.
Attach the drive to the Mac.
Launch Disk Utility from /Applications/Utilities.
Select the drive.
Choose the partition you want to format.
Choose erase, and set the format to be HFS Journaled.
You can then use Time Machine to do a full backup, or use Disk Utility to do an image from your system drive to the external.
Yes, time Machine is a full, recoverable backup. You don’t even need a bootable CD anymore. With Lion, you can boot from your recovery partition and re-install from your TM backup. With Snow Leopard, you can boot from your original system install disc, and restore the backup from there.
Ah, maybe this is why I’m having problems finding things. Is there any utility I can use to make a bootable system disc to carry with us (I don’t think I should travel with the original system install discs)? I want to be able to walk into BestBuy/Staples, buy an internal, blank 2.5" drive, and recover the system from there. Is that possible?
You can boot to USB although I would question how effectively you can do so with the dual partition situation you mentioned, IANA mac guy, but the kiss principle always applies. If you really have a mission critical need to quick restore a machine get another hard drive or two and clone the existing boot drive to a new drive. Carry that drive and whatever tools you need (most likely just a #1 phillips) if hard drive fails, shut down, swap, reboot, back in business.
The good news is that if you ever need to use it, Time Machine works very well. Back when the drive in my iMac died, after I replaced the drive, I booted the machine with an OS X disc, told it to restore from the most recent TM image and a couple hours later, it was all back - not a single email was lost.
The bad news, perhaps is that TM is meant to be a live, constantly updated shadow of your stuff. It will certainly work as a launch once, then store the drive backup tool, but that’s not really what it’s meant to do.
Moe recent Mac’s have a firmware install capability that will install the OS off the Internet. The idea being that you don’t need your installation disks to get going. This is not exactly useful if you are travelling and your best internet connection is a dialup in some seedy internet café on the other side of the planet. A bootable USB drive is a pretty robust solution. Especially if write protected.
SuperDuper - that I linked to above - creates a bootable image of your machine. and will work as a perfect backup restoration volume. SuperDuper simply updates differences from your Mac to the backup volume each time you backup, so once the initial image is created backups are quick. But since it makes the changes against the duplicate image you don’t get the security of an archive of changes that TimeMachine provides.
Something I do, and others do as well - SuperDuper backups can co-exist on the same disk as TimeMachine backups. Although rather redundant you can have both a disk that has a bootable - up-to-date copy of your life, plus the versioned archive presented by TimeMachine on the backup volume.
If something does go horribly wrong, do not have the backup disk shipped to you. Have a disk image copy of it made and the copy shipped to you. The last thing you want is the one and only good copy of your life wending its way around the planet in a padded bag, with the hope it will arrive, and arrive intact. And that you won’t mess up the restoration process and wipe the backup by mistake.
That’s fucking awesome.
Sorry, but sometimes profanity is called for.
This is a mid-2009 Macbook Pro, so I don’t know if it’s on there. But we copied system disks so we shoudl be all set–if it boots and we need the time machine files, we should be fine to rebuild.
Again, these are last resort (cue dramatic music) options. Besides storing things on our laptops, files we’re working on are on each other’s hard drives. Then there’s the USB flash drives with those and other not-so-important files. Then there’s the GoToMyPC account that I’d posted a thread about a week or so ago and has been testing fantastically. It connects to my desktop, which has full run of the home network.
The Time Machine and Windows system images are saved to external disks that we got just in case of a major disaster while travelling. These are not our NAS device, that’s not going anywhere, and it’s not our backup of the NAS device, that’s not going anywhere either. These are going to sit pre-packaged and shipping-labelled on the counter in case we call in a panic. A lot has to fail before we get to them.
Yup, you can boot a Mac from a multi-partitioned USB drive – no problem at all.
I think everyone else has covered the rest.
Rhythmdvl, Apple’s support site (Official Apple Support) is quite good. For instance:
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[li]Partitioning a USB drive: Apple - Support - Search from a Time Machine backup: Apple - Support - Search
Note: I selected Mac OS X 10.6 as the product, to filter the results, but you can certainly select OS X Lion if you’ve upgraded.
[/ul]
I say this not in an RTFM sense, but in the self-help sense since I imagine you’ll have questions in the future.
Actually, I (heart) RTFM. But I’m extraordinarily unfamiliar with Mac terminology and we’re a bit under the wire packing/project/leaving-wise, so I took the SDMB route.
If, for some reason, you really want to create a bootable exact clone of your hard drive without using a third-party utility (like Super Duper), you can still use Disk Utility. (This works at least up to 10.6; I don’t have Lion installed but I don’t think it’s gone).
Partition your external/backup drive to be the same size as the boot disk you’re cloning so you don’t waste space.
In Disk Utility, select the “Restore” Tab. You may note the text says, “restore or copy”. It’s the second we’re doing here. Follow the instructions.
Make doubly sure that the boot disk you want to copy (SOURCE) is the first one you pick, and the backup (DESTINATION) is second. This gets more confusing the second time you do it, because the disks will have the same name.
This process takes about an hour or more/100 GB, depending on the computer. It does not do anything incrementally, so it won’t be any faster if you do it again. Try to run it when you don’t need the computer.
In addition to Time Machine, I run this about once a month, since I find it simpler to boot from this when I need to unmount my hard drive for some reason.
The significant difference is, Apple has actually done something useful for the home user with it.
Sure, other computers can boot off of a network if you have an army of IT guys supporting you, but your grandma can reinstall Lion on her Mac from home with no special knowledge or support necessary.