ipod as a harddrive?

[absurdio]

I need to upgrade to panther. Before that, I need to back up my computer. A sane person would do this via cdrs and whatnot. I am not sane. What I'd like to do is just back up my entire harddrive on my ipod. I think that'd be just swell. At the moment, i have slightly over 30gb of stuff on my computer...and i have a 30gb ipod. i can probably delete that slight extra. The question is...can i use the ipod as any regular external harddrive? And if so, how would I make the appropriate system backup on it? All the music i have on my ipod is also on my harddrive at the moment, so i really think i SHOULD be able to fit everything on there...
but how?

thanks

 

[MacBandit]

Re: ipod as a harddrive?

Originally posted by absurdio
I need to upgrade to panther. Before that, I need to back up my computer. A sane person would do this via cdrs and whatnot. I am not sane. What I'd like to do is just back up my entire harddrive on my ipod. I think that'd be just swell. At the moment, i have slightly over 30gb of stuff on my computer...and i have a 30gb ipod. i can probably delete that slight extra. The question is...can i use the ipod as any regular external harddrive? And if so, how would I make the appropriate system backup on it? All the music i have on my ipod is also on my harddrive at the moment, so i really think i SHOULD be able to fit everything on there...
but how?

thanks

Well since you are installing a system you don't need to backup the system stuff at all. All you need to do is copy your users folders over and any system libraries you might want. If the iPod isn't showing up as a hard drive already go to iTunes and then the iPod at the bottom of the window and set the prefs to use the iPod as a drive.

 

[Horrortaxi]

Turn on firewire disk mode in itunes and then drag your home folder over. That's it. Actually, it's what a sane person would do. 30GB using CDRs is totally nuts.

 

[absurdio]

hm. my plan was to use carbon copy cloner to create a bootable backup of the whole system...but if you don't think i have to do that, my life would probably be easier.

I'm just afraid I'll totally mangle the install...and then have nothing to go back to.

But if you don't think that's a threat, what would you say are the important things to have copies of?


Incedentally, (just out of curiosity), my friend, Zach, just got a new iBook. And it, of course, came with panther. But he's been having fun tinkering around with x11 and all...and has tinkered too much and wants to reinstall panther, himself. So i'm probably gonna have him watch my every move to make sure I don't destroy anything (with a reputation like that, how ccould anything go wrong, right?). But (and here's the point) the install discs that came with his ibook say, as you would expect, ibook osx 10.3 ... is there any difference between the ibook 10.3 install discs and the ones for any other system? I mean 10.3 is 10.3 isn't it?

 

[dukemeiser]

You just need your home folder and any apps you might not want to reinstall (like Appleworks).

When I upgraded to Panther, from Jaguar, I used my iPod to back up my stuff. I did a clean install and then put everything back in it's place. It was time consuming because I had to put a lot of prefs files back, and my address book, etc. I would NOT just place your home folder back after upgrading, specifically your Library folder. A lot of those old prefs files might be obsolete or incorrect to use in Panther. And some of them could be corrupted. It's better to just replace only what you need.

I wouldn't hesitate to use an iPod.

Those iBook discs might not run on your computer, but they might. I think some of those can tell what kind of Mac you use and will prevent installation. The only way to know for sure is to try.

 

[SilentPanda]

Originally posted by absurdio
But (and here's the point) the install discs that came with his ibook say, as you would expect, ibook osx 10.3 ... is there any difference between the ibook 10.3 install discs and the ones for any other system? I mean 10.3 is 10.3 isn't it?

They won't work on anything but an iBook to the best of my rememberance. I remember my friend brought his PowerBook over and I had an iMac. We were trying to install 10.1 on his machine with my disks (he had forgotten his or something) but they wouldn't work. They said iMac on them. I'm assuming it's the same way with the iBook disks.

Oh... and I use my iPod almost exclusively for backups... I hardly ever use it for music... except on longs trips... I actually use .Mac Backup along with the iPod when I'm reformatting (or when I sold my FP iMac for my iBook G4). Works real slick and fast. I've even installed OS 9 on my iPod and booted off it to install OS 9 only software that has an OS X updater for it.

 

[MacBandit]

I use Carbon Copy Cloner to make backups. If you want the backup to precisely mirror the original data carbon copying is the only way to do it.