Backing Up Powerbook with OS 10.3.9

[gvegastiger]

Guys, I got a 3 year old Powerbook running Panther. I need to back it up and have a SimpleShare NAS drive. Its a great drive however I can't get the backup software to run bc it won't work on Panther.

Whats a good backup software that will work with Panther and NAS. Anyone out there use anything in particular that they like?

 

[mkrishnan]

SuperDuper.

Not everything it does is compatible with the NAS -- you won't be able to get a bootable backup unless your NAS can connect directly to your Mac and supports HFS+ partitions. But that's a NAS limitation -- even if SuperDuper wrote to it, it wouldn't be able to boot your Mac over the network anyways.

Otherwise, it's excellent. And it works with Panther, as long as you're fully updated. I use it weekly on both my iBook G4 and my iMac G5 (albeit both run Tiger).

 

[gvegastiger]

I can directly connect to it with an ethernet cable so I think I should be ok there.

 

[mkrishnan]

I can directly connect to it with an ethernet cable so I think I should be ok there.

No, no, I'm sorry. I'm not being clear. It'll work fine on the network, but it will only create non-bootable image copies (i.e. it'll make a sparse disk image on the drive and then put all the files inside the disk image, maintaining POSIX and Spotlight and everything else OS X does). You would not be able to boot from the image; you'd either have to use a second computer to image it back onto the PB or you'd have to use some kind of recovery boot disk.

You would have to connect it via USB or FW (only) to be able to write a bootable clone to it, and you'd have to connect it to FW (only) to be able to actually boot from it on a G4 powerbook.

 

[gvegastiger]

No, no, I'm sorry. I'm not being clear. It'll work fine on the network, but it will only create non-bootable image copies (i.e. it'll make a sparse disk image on the drive and then put all the files inside the disk image, maintaining POSIX and Spotlight and everything else OS X does). You would not be able to boot from the image; you'd either have to use a second computer to image it back onto the PB or you'd have to use some kind of recovery boot disk.

You would have to connect it via USB or FW (only) to be able to write a bootable clone to it, and you'd have to connect it to FW (only) to be able to actually boot from it on a G4 powerbook.

Don't all Macs come with a boot disk?

 

[mkrishnan]

Don't all Macs come with a boot disk?

Yes, of course. It's just that one of the things you can do with SD or CCC is, if you have a failure, immediately connect and boot off the clone image. You just can't do that with an image file made on a network share. That's all. You'll have to use the install DVD to bring the system back up and then do a reverse clone.

 

[gvegastiger]

Cool. That works for me.