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HOW TO: Keeping a hot backup of your Mac Drive

digital501.com — Instructions on how to keep a hot backup of your HD on an external drive. I didn't realize that OS X had cloning tools built in and the best part is that you can do it live--without needing to restart or "boot to dos" like you usually have to in Windows.

Who dugg this? Made popular Feb 17, 2006

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  • ra3ndy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"when are you ever going to have to back up your mac harddrive. now a pc...absolutely"

    Umm...dude, as a life-long Mac user, I'll say with the utmost confidence that you need to make backups of your drive. Macs use the same hard drives as any other PC. And all hard drives fail eventually.
  • cybo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Great tip you never know how good having a backup is till your data is gone.

    There is also a free program out there called Carbon Copy Cloner which will let you do the same thing but has more functionality. Such as syncing, so it will only update the remote drive instead of doing a full copy. Also you could schedule it to automatically run at certain times , and create a disk image from your drive too.

    http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
  • yalskey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1My vote is for SuperDuper. Very Very good tool. Only $20, and the tech support is awesome.

    And Apple's Backup 3 is pretty good too.

    Anybody know of a backup software for Mac OS X that makes exact image files of a hard drive and burns it across several DVDs?

    I want to make a disaster recovery set of DVDs that I can just pop in the drive, boot to the DVD and click a button and my hard drive will be restored completely (after inserting all the spanned disks of coarse)

    That would be my dream backup program.
  • optimusfx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This is one of the BEST features of OSX. Its easy to make, bootable disk clones. I always make a backup before I travel or send my PB in for a warranty repair. I also do this regularly. Disk Utility, FireWire, and Target Disk mode all work together brilliantly.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"why not:

    cp -r /Users/user /Volumes/DRIVE/"

    a plain old cp -r can have problems with files that are currently open, we used to do this on our server, then we tried booting from the backup, and it was not bootable, many things in /var ended up corrupt... ditto is a better command to use if you're going to do it by hand, carbon copy cloner is just an interface that uses hdutil and ditto to make an image/clone that will be bootable... however, i have seen instances where it will have problems, specifally whten cloning a server boot drive, if you are running openldap... disk utility clones are better at cloning open system files like databases (/var/db/openldap)....
  • andrewhodel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1why not:

    cp -r /Users/user /Volumes/DRIVE/

    every night in cron???
  • elroy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1okay, well *every* unix has the "dd" tool built-in, which you can use with crond to do a scheduled backup. you can also use apple's hdiutil to backup to an image.

    however, you're better off to use 2 identical drives and set up a software RAID. then its always backed up, and if one drive crashes, it's no big deal (only problem is if you damage your drive in software, such as accidently removing something important as root).

    "So Mac has one built-in. BFD." -- it is a big deal, because there are several cases where macos includes some useful functionality that you must install third party tools for on windows. it's not like that's beyond anyone's ability, but it's unneccesary effort (for a more expensive price tag).
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"*Can* you build a RAID1 into a mac or does it not posses the functionality?"

    OS X supports software RAID 1 (and RAID 0), you have to set it up before you install the OS though... Not quite as fast as hardware raid, but it does a decent job...
  • l0ne, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1yalskey: You should "get dirty" with hdiutil, the command-line tool that Disk Utility uses to do most of its jobs. It includes image splitting (but you have to get all the image parts in the same directory to mount them when you recover, so you need a very big external disk).
  • ra3ndy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1CarbonCopyCloner will also to regular scheduled updates to a backup drive.

    http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

  • jrh1970, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Try SuperDuper. It has the ability to automate the process and a feature that allows only the changes to be copied, so it's faster. http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
  • umdigger, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0SuperDuper is great, I've used it to sync new HD's when replacing older ones. Carbon Copy Cloner is really good too, and it free.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"why not:

    cp -r /Users/user /Volumes/DRIVE/"

    Also with the method described, you don't have to deal with reinstalling all of your software.
  • MellerTime, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Wow, no more FrontPage in Office 2007 and hot-backups of my Mac... What's going to complete the digg-alicious trifecta?
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This sounds very interesting, but I am a PC guy. Someone please tell me how to do something like this on a PC. For free (hopefully!)?
  • mtlea, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I've been utilizing this for a couple years now. Definitely not anything new.
    no digg
  • zonk3r, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0i use datnz's retrospect to back up. it isn't a hot backup as it does it as a dataset, however it does give you extremely tight control of your backups. You can also do compression on the data, differential backups, scheduling, etc.

    btw, the way i use it is that i have a second internal drive in my mac, i have osx set to turn itself on at 2am at 2.05a retrospect starts up and does a backup to the second disk and then the machine powers off at 4a. rarely does it take more than 10m to do the backup but i let it go just in case. it is a graphic design workstation at a printshop so we have a lot of large files...
  • willhoy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1er... RAID1 anyone?
  • benspicer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0very, very cool. thanks for that :)
  • ascheinberg, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Awesome tip.
  • epotter, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Bigg Digg from me. I've been looking for something like this for a while.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0"I'm with the "How do I automate this to happen regularly in the background?" crowd"

    Acronis True Image will do this also.

  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0This totally beats the iBackup tool that Apple charges $99 a year for.
  • Math-Sux, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Deja Vu (packaged with Toast) works great for me.
  • supersteve, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0This is great.
    now if only my mac could clean my clothing and make dinner for me. Macs Rules

    DIGG!!!!
  • Camper, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0I'm with the "How do I automate this to happen regularly in the background?" crowd

    But definitely digg
  • mdon77, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0This is basic user knowledge. Did the same thing in 10.0
    no digg
  • N3wtR0ckn13, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0when are you ever going to have to back up your mac harddrive. now a pc...absolutely.
  • willhoy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0haha, don't point the "expensive" finger at the PC crowd
  • yalskey, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0oh yeah, and it would also need to use non-lossy compression.
  • N3wtR0ckn13, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1@ra3ndy --thanks for the hot tip, i wasn't aware. syke!! your so p0ned!!
  • irie, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Thanks, I'm down for using something built into my O/S.
  • FullMetalMonkey, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0Sweet!
  • willhoy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0*Can* you build a RAID1 into a mac or does it not posses the functionality?
  • UGM2099, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0thanks!!
  • rafleming, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0"er... RAID1 anyone?"

    Don't be stupid.
    RAID1 is not a data backup solution. RAID1 is hardware redundancy to protect against hardware failure.
    If you accidentally delete important files from a RAID1 set... the only thing you've accomplished is that you've deleted those important files from two drives instead of 1.
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0"the best part is that you can do it live--without needing to restart or "boot to dos" like you usually have to in Windows."

    More FUD from a Mac fanboi. Anyone who's used the $30 copy of Acronis True Image knows you can do a live HD Image creation as well. I'd imagine most of the other HD Imaging programs do the same. So Mac has one built-in. BFD.

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