Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

New to OSX need a little help backing up for a hardware change

R

RoskO

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 14, 2008
74
32
Hi All,

edit: I hit the wrong key (not used to the mac yet). It posted.....and I didn't even notice. My real post should be after this....can someone del this?
 
McGiord said:
If you have Leopard use Time Machine to backup your whole system to an external HDD.
If not then use Disk Utility.
Click to expand...

I can't find his initial post but if he is looking for a way to back up his system to an external the best free option (well, donationware) is Carbon Copy Cloner. It creates a duplicate copy of your Macintosh HD (thus the name) which you can boot from and use on a Firewire external drive. It is fast, easy to use and flawless. SuperDuper does much the same with some added features (can back up Time Machine disks, etc) but is $27.95 and only just last week released a Leopard-compatible version.
 
Here's my original post...or post that should be the main post.

Hi All, I purchased a MBP 15", 2.4ghz, and so far I'm sorta happy....

I find it a little slow in comparison to my windows laptop, but that's not a very fair comparison just yet, my lenovo has a 7,200rpm drive with 3gb ram, the MBP has a 5400rpm drive that performs pretty poorly from what I have seen...

I ordered 4gb of ram, and the hitachi 7k200 drive to replace the stocker. Currently I have OSX installed with VMWare fusion, and Windows on bootcamp with a 60gb partition. I'd love some way to backup this configuration so when I get my new drive, I can just image, or walk through a few steps to get it running the way it is now. Does anyone have an easy way to do this? My first thought would be to image or time machine the osx partition to an external drive. Then boot to windows, and run windows backup and image it to another external drive....when I get the new hard drive, load OSX (can I just reload from time machine? I assume so), setup the windows partition, install windows, then restore it from backup.

I appreciate any help on the subject. Thanks All.
 
RoskO said:
I ordered 4gb of ram, and the hitachi 7k200 drive to replace the stocker. Currently I have OSX installed with VMWare fusion, and Windows on bootcamp with a 60gb partition. I'd love some way to backup this configuration so when I get my new drive, I can just image, or walk through a few steps to get it running the way it is now. Does anyone have an easy way to do this? My first thought would be to image or time machine the osx partition to an external drive. Then boot to windows, and run windows backup and image it to another external drive....when I get the new hard drive, load OSX (can I just reload from time machine? I assume so), setup the windows partition, install windows, then restore it from backup.

I appreciate any help on the subject. Thanks All.
Click to expand...

OK, now I understand your situation. My advice is still Carbon Copy Cloner as I indicated above. As for the Boot Camp installation of Windows I recommend Winclone. Move the image file it creates to your external HD. When you get your new machine first restore your Carbon Copy Cloner image to the new machine and then boot into OS X (on the new machine). Then, using the Boot Camp Assistant you will create a Boot Camp partition on the new machine and finally using Winclone extract the image of your old Boot Camp install to the newly created partition on the new machine.

You will have no need to do anything from the Boot Camp Windows installation at all. Winclone is a fantastic utility that works right in OS X.

It's fast and easy. I've done it twice on my own machine here in the past month or so.
 
Sweet...thanks for the info, that sounds very easy to do....I just need 2 external disks I think. Winclone warned me that it will wipe out my external drive....as did time machine (due to file system differences).
 
RoskO said:
Sweet...thanks for the info, that sounds very easy to do....I just need 2 external disks I think. Winclone warned me that it will wipe out my external drive....as did time machine (due to file system differences).
Click to expand...

Well, technically that is not exactly correct but THANK you for reminding me. What you need is at least two separate "partitions" on your external HD because Carbon Copy Cloner will indeed wipe out whatever is on the existing backup location. WinClone will let you save the image anywhere.

This is another advantage of SuperDuper come to think of it. I think they have a feature now that will let you backup to a disk without wiping the existing contents.

Just use Disk Utility to partition your external HD into two partitions at least big enough to hold their respective OS backups and you'll be fine. You don't need two separate physical disks. ;)
 
Thanks again for the info...I'll check out those programs shortly (already have winclone).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back