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Backing up HDD
- Thread starter Haemoglobin
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Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper are my favourites. Simple, straightforward and reliable.
I might have a bias for SD because it's still free and you can snag older versions right from the homepage.
You can use disk utility to create live bootable dmgs of the current OS X your running. Then you can restore the dmg to a partition later. I do this to skip the boot into CD installing part of OS X on later setups by creating dmg’s of the partition OS X just installed to right after reboot.
For OS 9, just drag and drop.
If you haven’t already, invest in SATA2USB or IDE2USB adapters.
I am under the impression, that the PPC-version of CCC is free - just a nag-screen at the start - and that SD! had always been shareware, unless you are content to always make a full-clone instead of only clone the changes to previous clone-backups.
To be able to boot from the external USB-drive-clone I had some problems related to the wrong preformatting / partitioning of the external drive, but I can't remember the details ... maybe preformatting/partitioning with an intel-mac and post-Leopard OS X - so I'd use a PPC-machine's disk-utility for that job.
Also take into account, that, if you add the os9-drivers to the external-drive in order to have os9 booting-options, your partitions are fixed and can only be changed by erasing the drive or getting rid of the os9 booting-driver files (there has been a discussion about that some time ago. Maybe @eyoungren has better knowledge and memory ...)
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I'm rather sort of the small brain ones [... chest-beating
] and started with SuperDuper!until I fully understood the many options under the hood of CCC (especially with the later OSX-version and their RecoveryPartitions)
CCC was indeed free up to a certain version number (I don't know which version). But they decided to monetize it which is why it's no longer free.
As to partitions, my understanding was that with Leopard at least, you could modify partitions without losing data (even if the partition had OS9 drivers on it).
I may be wrong on that though.
AFAIK the os9 drivers (e.g. a drive build up in Tiger) interfere with partitioning on Tiger and also on Leopard and the drive is erases prior of changing the partitioning-scheme.
There had been a discussion about how to get rid of the os9 drivers. Unfortunately after I messed with my hard drive(s) and had to rebuild stuff (or maybe just clone via FW/TDM from another functional unit).
Edit: aah, here, just a click away! And guess, who started discussion ...
Removing OS9 Drivers?
I've always wondered if there is a way to remove these after formatting a drive with them. What are the benefits (if any) of removing them and does that have any negative impact? Is it possible to do without reformatting the drive?
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Yeah, I wondered if you'd find that. Couldn't recall how that went, but now we know.AFAIK the os9 drivers (e.g. a drive build up in Tiger) interfere with partitioning on Tiger and also on Leopard and the drive is erases prior of changing the partitioning-scheme.
There had been a discussion about how to get rid of the os9 drivers. Unfortunately after I messed with my hard drive(s) and had to rebuild stuff (or maybe just clone via FW/TDM from another functional unit).
Edit: aah, here, just a click away! And guess, who started discussion ...
Removing OS9 Drivers?
I've always wondered if there is a way to remove these after formatting a drive with them. What are the benefits (if any) of removing them and does that have any negative impact? Is it possible to do without reformatting the drive?
iPartition will let you add them afterwards but it doesn't boot - although it does let you partition a drive with OS9 drivers without data loss. But with Disk Utility? No.
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CCC is really easy and the versions for 10.3 - 10.5 are free to use, I believe. At least, my dad always had copies of them and they never ask for a serial number. Haven't used SuperDuper. CCC has been used to clone OS setups across different Macs for me, so a clone backup would essentially be the same thing and work just fine.