Copying everything from eMac to external drive?

I still have an old eMac that takes up space and which I would finally want to get rid of, but sadly there's still all of my stuff on it.

I was wondering what the fastest and easiest way of copying all my data to an external drive would be?
Time Machine won't work on it I believe, do I have to copy each folder one by one to the drive?

I'm also not really a fan of any other "backup apps" except Time Machine to be honest.

Well, thanks in advance in case someone knows.

Weaselboy said:

Open Disk Utility and go to the restore tab then drag Macintosh HD into the source section and your external in the destination section then click Restore. That will copy your entire drive contents to the external.

Click to expand...

That would delete everything from the eMac, right? That's what I found out at least. I'm a bit scared in case it doesn't work. Is there a way to copy all of it to the external drive without deleting the original drive? Any I suppose it works with USB too right? My mum has an old Mac as well and I'll be doing to same for her, except I'll be copying her contents to a USB key.

FireWire would be a good idea, but I only have a FireWire 800 external HD, or USB (flash drive or hard drive). The eMac however is FireWire 400. Perhaps I could buy a converter and bring it back after I finished copying everything

But as for my mum, we want to copy her stuff to a USB drive (I bought a 64 GB USB just for that) so there's only this solution.

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Weaselboy said:

No that would not delete anything from the eMac. All it would do is clone (copy) everything on the eMac drive to the external drive. Works the same with a USB key. You just need to make sure the destination drive is as large or larger than the source drive.

Click to expand...

Okay it seems I misread something, it's the drive you will copy the content to that will be deleted, not the one being copied!

bunnspecial said:

As an aside, there were four generations of eMac, and only the last two had USB 2.0.

If your eMac is an older one with USB 1.1(if it has a 700mhz, 800mhz, or 1ghz processor it likely is) you will be looking at a long time to copy the entire HDD via USB. Assuming you have 20gb on the hard drive(half the 40gb capacity of of a typical eMac HDD) and you can sustain the theoretical 12mb/s with USB 1.1 through the entire copy, you're looking at 28 hours to copy the entire contents. Firewire(again assuming you sustain the theoretical maximum of 400 mb/s, which is easier to do with Firewire than USB) the copy time will be a little under one hour.

If you have USB 2.0, the copy time will be similar between USB and Firewire.

If you don't, however, use Firewire if at all possible.

Click to expand...

It seems they are USB one, I just looked at a list and I believe they are from 2003 and 2004. We have 3 of them. Only the very last generation seems to have USB 2. But then again, USB always seemed to be pretty fast on those Macs, we still use them (one of them regularly) and even big files are copied quite quickly. I'll have to check to make sure, but I'm pretty sure they're USB 1.

It would suck of course if it took that long, but then again, it's not the daily computers so it doesn't bother anyone if they run 28 hours. One of them makes strange noises however, so I'm scared it will die during the process. It is unlikely because I think it's just dust in the fan, but you never know.

A FireWire 400 to 800 adapter doesn't seem to cost too much, I'll have a look if I could get one.
Then, later, I could copy all the stuff from the external drive to my mums USB so she can have all her stuff on it, when she gets a new computer.

Sanchez25 said:

Okay it seems I misread something, it's the drive you will copy the content to that will be deleted, not the one being copied!

Click to expand...

It seems like this will still be a problem actually, because there's plenty of stuff on the drive I'd like to copy it to. My time machine backups for example, which I haven't loaded into the Mac I'm writing from yet. I would be terrible if all of my work would be lost, and all my other things.
Does this function in disk utility only delete what's on a partition before copying stuff to this drive, or does it delete the whole drive? I have another drive but it's only USB.

Perfect, thanks.

Hey!

When I drag "Macintosh HD" to Source, everything is fine. But when I try to drag the external drive to the destination, it won't work. The field isn't clickable also, it's as if it was greyed out. Anyone know what's happening here? Thanks.

Weaselboy said:

Have you made a partition on the external drive? Once you do, just drag that partition into the destination field.

Click to expand...

Do I have to make one? The HD is just a little larger in size than the files I have to copy.

Edit: Okay I can make one of the same size as the drive itself.

Okay, I seem to have a small problem. Today I bought the FireWire cable because a member said it will take ages with USB 1. Connected it and all works fine, so far so good.

Now I need to make a new partition on my external hard drive, for the content of the eMac. That hard drive contains extremely important stuff on two other partitions!

Then I read in an article that disk utility in 10.5 brings some new features such as adding, removing, modifying partitions without deleting the whole drive. (http://macs.about.com/od/applications/ss/diskutilitysize.htm)
This is very important for me to know, because I'm running 10.4.11 and Disk Utility 10.5.6 (not to be confused with the Disk Utility that comes with OSX 10.5 apparently)

Is that information correct? Will it delete my whole drive if I create this new partition now? I would create it from "Free space" that is still available on the drive. Thanks ! ! !

Weaselboy said:

That article is correct. If there is free space at the end after the two partitions already there, you can just click the + to add a new partition to the end.

Just do not format the existing partitions or click the minus at the lower left as that would erase/delete the existing partition.

Is there now free space already there after the second partition if you look at external in Disk Util?

Click to expand...

Well, there is no plus or minus in this old version of OS X. I've uploaded some screenshots. The Free Space is marked as "Free Space" as you can see, I can go to the drop down menu (top right) and select "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)". And then I can click on "Split" at the bottom, because I don't need that much space. 85 GB will be enough.

I'm not sure how I "confirm" all of this, I guess I got to click on the "Partition" button that is in the bottom right of the window. I'm just a bit scared. And not used to these old OS anymore haha!

Altemose said:

If you are simply trying to wipe the drive, you can use the erase tab when booted off a disk. Out of curiosity, what are you doing with this eMac afterwards?

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Well, that's exactly what I DON'T want to do! Haha

I'm probably going to sell it because it takes up too much space and I'm not using it. We have two more of them anyway. Do you want it?

Altemose: Austria! If you don't mind distance I could check out what shipping would cost to you. I'm not sure if there's differences between European and American models but if yes, you'd have a European Model I guess!

Weaselboy said:

Sorry I'm not familiar at all with how to non-destructivley partition in that old version of OS X. I think you are on track with that show 475.24 and could just click partition there, but I am not sure and don't want to see you lose data.

Do you have a newer Mac you can use to make the partition?

Just a reminder though, to use Disk Util for this the partition will need to be the same to slightly larger that the volume in the eMac.

Click to expand...

I do have a newer Mac, but how could it help me? You mean first to copy all the content from the eMac on the Mac Pro, then copy it from the Mac Pro to the external drive?

And it's 72 GB I have to copy, I thought to leave around 80-85. Waste of space already I guess?