How to backup HDD using Terminal in recovery mode

[Nugymac]

Hi everyone
Avid Mac user here (2 iMacs, MacBook Pro, watch etc.)
Need some help in backing up a failing hard driver to an external hard drive on a 2010 iMac 27”.

I have used all possibilities and the safe mode has stopped loading which means am the situation is dire...

I tried to get an image of the HDD but it took forever and appeared to be stuck...

I am looking for help using the command lined, but got really stuck here.

basically I am after some support in festoon to what commands I can use, i.e -CP /Volumes/ etc.

just to articulate, I am in recovery mode

thanks Heaps

 

[Weaselboy]

just to articulate, I am in recovery mode

Okay... so you are in command-r boot recovery mode? Just start Disk Utility and "restore" the internal drive to an external drive.

Restore a disk using Disk Utility on Mac

In Disk Utility on your Mac, make an exact copy of one volume on another volume.

support.apple.com

 

[MacUser2525]

Hi everyone
Avid Mac user here (2 iMacs, MacBook Pro, watch etc.)
Need some help in backing up a failing hard driver to an external hard drive on a 2010 iMac 27”.

I have used all possibilities and the safe mode has stopped loading which means am the situation is dire...

I tried to get an image of the HDD but it took forever and appeared to be stuck...

I am looking for help using the command lined, but got really stuck here.

basically I am after some support in festoon to what commands I can use, i.e -CP /Volumes/ etc.

just to articulate, I am in recovery mode

thanks Heaps

It is unlikely you will want to be copying the /Volumes/ as I doubt you have partitioned the internal drive. What you likely want is your user and the files contained in its directory. This is in the /Users directory a command to copy all the files keeping the permissions would be.

cp -Rp /Users/username /Volumes/External_Drive_Name/

This will duplicate the directory on the external drive with a recursive copy (-R) of all directories and files copied by cp, doing all the directories beneath the username one. With the permissions preserved, the p in the command. You will need to mount the external and internal drive for this command to work in the terminal of the recovery mode. A diskutil list command will get you the information required to do this. Then use the mount command to mount the drives, you will need to search on this one I do not remember it off the top of my head.

 

[Nugymac]

It is unlikely you will want to be copying the /Volumes/ as I doubt you have partitioned the internal drive. What you likely want is your user and the files contained in its directory. This is in the /Users directory a command to copy all the files keeping the permissions would be.

cp -Rp /Users/username /Volumes/External_Drive_Name/

This will duplicate the directory on the external drive with a recursive copy (-R) of all directories and files copied by cp, doing all the directories beneath the username one. With the permissions preserved, the p in the command. You will need to mount the external and internal drive for this command to work in the terminal of the recovery mode. A diskutil list command will get you the information required to do this. Then use the mount command to mount the drives, you will need to search on this one I do not remember it off the top of my head.

Thank you so much!
I had to play around with diskutil and pwd
Starting with cd\ to move back and checking the volumes with Is, I finally managed to load up the Mac drive and copy the items using the line above - you are amazing!

The hard drive was dead, even disk utility was struggling to get the information but once I got this code right, it worked!

Im starting to love Terminal, such a great tool.

I guess it’s time to farewell the old HDD and to get a SSD in there

 

[MacUser2525]

Thank you so much!
I had to play around with diskutil and pwd
Starting with cd\ to move back and checking the volumes with Is, I finally managed to load up the Mac drive and copy the items using the line above - you are amazing!

The hard drive was dead, even disk utility was struggling to get the information but once I got this code right, it worked!

Im starting to love Terminal, such a great tool.

I guess it’s time to farewell the old HDD and to get a SSD in there

Great to hear you managed it, yes the time of the HDD is done for operating systems. I only use them for storage now, all my boot drives are SSD or NVMe. Terminal is a wonderful little program I always have one open with a few tabs open in it. It is usually a lot simpler to do a command to manage the files than it is to do it graphically. For my remote servers it is the only way I usually access them via ssh.