HELP! Superduper - Restoring a Sparse image

[nuuser]

Hi,

Any help with this would be fantastic. I am in dire straits I think.

I recently purchased Superduper about 4 weeks ago. Before taking a three week break with my laptop I made a back up as a sparse image, and discarded my old back-up. Yesterday following my return with my PowerbookG4 intact, I then experienced severe problems with my disk, and could not restart or do much, with much noise, whirring and clicking. This morning I was able to start up normally. I decided it would be a good idea to back-up the work I have done since my first back-up, so I attached the Lacie and ran Superduper. It was set to back-up sparse, and asked to do this, warning me it needed to erase the old version. I continued (alas) and during this back-up my system has completely stopped altogether.

I am now neither able to access this mac at all, it wont restart and I cant repair it with disk utility, and I find that my Sparse image only contains a few files, I take it those it started to rewrite at time of failure. I am sure the Mac has a fatal or terminal end, but I desparately need to restore my back-up if I can. I have about three years work on it!!

Any help or advice would be very helpful...

Thanks in advance. Neal

 

[blodwyn]

Hi,

Any help with this would be fantastic. I am in dire straits I think.

I recently purchased Superduper about 4 weeks ago. Before taking a three week break with my laptop I made a back up as a sparse image, and discarded my old back-up. Yesterday following my return with my PowerbookG4 intact, I then experienced severe problems with my disk, and could not restart or do much, with much noise, whirring and clicking. This morning I was able to start up normally. I decided it would be a good idea to back-up the work I have done since my first back-up, so I attached the Lacie and ran Superduper. It was set to back-up sparse, and asked to do this, warning me it needed to erase the old version. I continued (alas) and during this back-up my system has completely stopped altogether.

I am now neither able to access this mac at all, it wont restart and I cant repair it with disk utility, and I find that my Sparse image only contains a few files, I take it those it started to rewrite at time of failure. I am sure the Mac has a fatal or terminal end, but I desparately need to restore my back-up if I can. I have about three years work on it!!

Any help or advice would be very helpful...

Thanks in advance. Neal

You may or may not be out of luck, but here's what I would do...

1. Replace the failing hard disk in your Powerbook immediately. Don't try any more booting and/or recovery techniques on the current disk
2. Reinstall a clean OS X on the new disk

Now you have 2 shots at getting your data back, from the original failing PB drive, and from the Lacie.

- It's just possible that the previous SuperDuper sparseimage is in the Trash on the Lacie, in which case you can drag it back out again
- If not then you could try putting the original Powerbook hard disk in an enclosure and try copying your files from it onto the new disk. This is worth trying several times. Urban legends suggest that either mild warming or cooling of the drive can sometimes give temporary life, but I haven't had to resort to this personally

I maintain a policy where I never have any important files on only 1 drive. So as well as Time Machine (automatic hourly backup), I maintain a SuperDuper bootable image (manual monthly backup), a Chronosync documents backup on a separate drive (manual weekly backup), and a documents backup to Amazon S3 via Jungledisk (automatic daily backup). Maybe an overkill, but I've never lost any data.

Good luck.

 

[nuuser]

Thanks

Thanks for the advice. It makes total sense, I will implement as soon as I can.

Your back-up strategy sounds commendable. I am putting something equivalent in place.

Very helpful indeed.