Carbon Copy Cloner

[Bonecrusher]

I've had to rebuild my HD twice in the past month and would like to create my own restore discs. I've installed 10.5 and will update it to 10.5.8 and will install studio 8, office 2008 and a few other apps. What I would like to do is create my own set of recovery media so I can just pop it into my superdrive and restore to a new hard drive or different one.

Does anyone know if this is possible and do you have a set of directions? I did have a set but it's gone as it was on my old hd that crashed.

 

[old-wiz]

CCC builds a bootable clone. The simplest way is to have another HDD; then you just clone the boot disk onto the external and you are all set.

It wouldn't be practical to clone to DVD - too much space would be needed and a clone DVD would not be bootable.

 

[mscriv]

I agree that Carbon Copy Cloner is an excellent program. It was freeware for a long time, but has now transitioned to a purchase model.

Another good program that will do pretty much the same thing as CCC is SuperDuper. It's also a good quality backup and cloning program, but it's still freeware at this point.

With either of these programs you can create bootable clones on an external HD. I would suggest Firewire, but USB will also work. Of course the Apple solution to what you are looking for is to make a Time Machine back up. In the event of a crash you can boot with your OSX Leopard Install disk and then restore from your latest Time Machine back up.

All of the options I have referenced above require the use of an external back up hard drive. As old-wiz stated, I would not use optical media for a full system restore or back up solution. HD's can be paired with software to do incremental back ups and keep your system fresh. With restore disks you are stuck with no way to update the disks over time as your system changes. The disks will quickly become outdated and thus you would have to be regularly burning/creating new back up disks just to stay current.

 

[Lancer]

I've used CCC for years, even now with Time Machine.

My set up is TM runs 24/7 and I do CCC on a 2nd HDD every couple of weeks, or when I think about it

I used CCC onto a USB3 drive to migrate to my new iMac, with USB3 it was done in a couple of hours and not most of the day which would have happened with a USB2 case.

 

[Fishrrman]

CCC is what you want.

If you're still using 10.5.8, you can also use the free version of CCC, version 3.4.7.

You will find it here:
http://www.bombich.com/download.html

With CCC, you can create an exact, bootable copy of your main HD.

Then, you can boot from the clone if necessary, and "re-clone" it to wherever you wish -- to your primary drive, to a different drive, etc.

 

[teleromeo]

I started to use CCC to make a bootable clone after I had to recover with time machine after a crash. I believe time machine is bootable now but in my case it took several hours to get my data back.
A combination of time machine and CCC is what I use now. If my drive should fail again I can restart with the clone almost imidiately.
I also used CCC to clone everything to a newly installed SSD. I booted up with my clone and let CCC do the work. In the meantime I was able to use my MBP to do some work.

 

[old-wiz]

I use SuperDuper on 4 Macs here. I needed it only once in 5 years, and that was a corrupted HDD. I copied the SuperDuper clone back and all was well.

 

[PDJ-SF]

CCC or SuperDuper

I have used SuperDuper for several years and am quite happy with its performance. The developer replies to email technical questions very quickly.

I tried it first because it has a free / unlicensed mode. I used it enough that I purchased a license.

CCC has a good reputation, too.