bare metal restore

[macarthurd]

Mirrors and images are not the best solution for me, so I'm trying to find a process to do a bare metal restore (Tiger).

This can be reinstalling OS X and then restoring over it (does anyone know if that works?), or using a boot disk (I looked at bootdisk, but it wasn't compatible with Tiger), or whatever.

TIA.

 

[nitynate]

Bare Metal?

Uh... You mean core OS install?


Yeah, do that with the OS X dvd. "erase and install" and do it with custom options.

 

[macarthurd]

That will get me to the starting point.

My objective is to restore the system to the condition it was in prior to whatever caused me to need to do the restore.

So, I want to get an OS on the system so I can load the bacula client, and then restore everything from tape. But, every OS has its special requirements:
--> Windows requires the system state to be restored after everything else, and then there is a security fix to apply.
--> Linux requires that proc, sys, and boot *not* be restored.

So, I'm looking for the comparable requirements for OS X.

Again, TIA.

 

[mkrishnan]

Mmm, I'm pretty sure I understand what you're talking about... the issue is sort of a boostrapping issue -- restoring the entire filesystem from backup is prevented by the fact that the system you boot from to re-install does not want you to overwrite its own system files?

I don't have an answer for you, but you may want to look at this:

http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/04/23/mac-backup-software-harmful/

And particularly also at the previous blog post linked in the first paragraph... be careful in assuming a solution like this will do what you want; it may not.

 

[macarthurd]

re: plasticfuture.org

Whoa! What a tome! But, it seems to echo what I've heard before - OS X backups = just clone the disk.

I'm resigning myself to the conclusion that loading the OS, re-installing the apps, and restoring the app/user data is the only way to do this. Why???

I have a Win/Lin/Mac environment, don't have budget for/want to buy separate solutions, the one I'm using works on all the platforms I'll ever use, it's fast, reliable, and it's open source.

Any corrections or suggestions about howto are more than welcome.