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How best to backup a drive full of different partitions, each with a different OS X full install?

EugW

EugW

macrumors P6
Original poster
Jun 18, 2017
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Earth (for now)
The icons in gold are different OS X clean installs from 10.6 to 10.13 for my old Macs.

OSXInstalls.jpg


I also have a drive with similar partitions for PowerPC Macs. However, these drives are old now. How best to back these up? It would be a royal PITA to re-make all these installs, even if I still had the install discs and the computers that were compatible with them.

Is there software that will replicate the partition structure of this drive keeping all the active installs? Or do I still have to clone each partition separately? Alternatively I suppose I could make images out of all of them for storage on a single folder. No partitions needed. The only problem there though is I can't boot off images. Having full bootable partitions is very convenient for troubleshooting old machines.
 
chabig said:
Image them with Disk Utility.
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Yeah, thinking about this more, that's probably the best way to go. I don't need the backup to be ready to go. If my primary drive dies, then I can recreate it from the images without having to remake the installs.
 
I used to do this with a flash drive. I would grab 120GB SSD, they are like 20$ these days and clone the original drive with the partitions to it to the new SSD using DU or CCC.
 
EugW said:
Yeah, thinking about this more, that's probably the best way to go. I don't need the backup to be ready to go. If my primary drive dies, then I can recreate it from the images without having to remake the installs.
Click to expand...
You could also just save the installers, rather than the installations.
 
Yeah, I prefer having the completed installs. Some of those install partitions have all the latest point updates and security updates, as well as software updates to the latest compatible third party browsers (Chrome, Firefox). It make the installing to a machine so much faster. Plus having a drive full of these ready for boot up makes troubleshooting way easier.

Also, I have install discs for some really old versions of Mac OS X that are machine specific. The install discs don't actually work on other machines. Apple stopped doing this about a decade ago IIRC, but nonetheless it makes installing stuff like 10.5 from an original install disc problematic.
 
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EugW said:
Also, I have install discs for some really old versions of Mac OS X that are machine specific.
Click to expand...
The machine check can be removed, making these discs "universal". One exception is grey Tiger Intel discs which won't work on PowerPC machines, and vice versa.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
The machine check can be removed, making these discs "universal". One exception is grey Tiger Intel discs which won't work on PowerPC machines, and vice versa.
Click to expand...
Cool. I didn't know that. I'll have to look into that (unless you have a link off hand).
 
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