My drive is going clickety click!!!

[pitt1717]

so my drive is making the dreaded click. i ordered a new drive and am in the process of backing up... I got pretty much everything in my home folder moved to my server except for caches folder under the libraries folder.

is there anything i'm missing here? my mail, itunes, pictures, calendar, bookmarks should all be backed up under my home folder correct? do i need to copy anything from the Hard drive volume?

I'm gonna do a fresh install anyway, but just want to make sure the things i need are all backed up. also wincloned my bootcamp partition

 

[gr8tfly]

Applications?

Why not image (Disk Utility's Restore) your current drive to your backup volume in its entirety (unless you already have corrupt files)? That way, you can either restore back to the new drive (with a complete image of your old drive) or do a clean OS install and migrate from the backup. Migration will get all your applications, settings and personal data.

To do the image backup, boot off your OS-X install DVD and run Disk Utility from there. Then, go to the Restore tab. Choose "erase destination" to enable faster block copy. Make sure your source and destination are set correctly to avoid - well, something bad...

Hope this helps and you get all your data backed up before the drive fails.

I'd also strongly suggest you purchase a second external drive and set it up for Time Machine. That way, if you do have a sudden drive failure, you'll have a backup which is at most an hour old. You can restore from that, or any previous backup.

 

[QuarterSwede]

Not sure why you didn't just make a Time Machine backup. After installing OS X use Migration Assistant to copy all your apps and settings over. It'll be a clean install with all of the files you want back. Easy and you won't forget anything.

 

[S.B.G]

Not sure why you didn't just make a Time Machine backup. After installing OS X use Migration Assistant to copy all your apps and settings over. It'll be a clean install with all of the files you want back. Easy and you won't forget anything.

Agreed. That is the easiest way to preserve everything. I did that when I upgraded the HDD in my MBP. Installed OS/X and then used Migration Assistant. It was a flawless and easy process. It restored ALL my files, preferences and applications.

 

[BertyBoy]

In case you don't go for the full drive backup:

the top level Library directory will have a lot of application preferences.

 

[pitt1717]

i used to use time machine but over a samba share. stopped working after the last update and gave up on it as i don't have a spare external. 2 machines, not including this MBP has 4tb total between them.

i tried CCC as well, but it stalls as the drive corruption is causing havoc.
as for migration assistant, i totally forgot about that. going to try that now

thanks