Partiton New Macbook - Newbie

[quarkrad]

My son has ordered a new Macbook. When it arrives I have advised he creates a new partition on it and makes an image of his new Macbook, so if ever he screws it up in the future he can go back to day one. In the coming months he will get an external hard drive and save the image on that as well but for the short term he will keep the image on the same HD (I appreciate it is a risk). I have read in 10.5 there is an app called Disk Utility in Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility that will do the trick - i.e. create the new partition. If I use this is it non destructive? I.e. will it create a new partition (2) on the HD without destroying the data (original partition (1))? As it is a new machine there will be no 'user data' to backup - but when we switch it back on we obviously want a working machine as before; but this time with an extra partition (is it called Volume in Apple World?)

Thanks

 

[jav6454]

My son has ordered a new Macbook. When it arrives I have advised he creates a new partition on it and makes an image of his new Macbook, so if ever he screws it up in the future he can go back to day one. In the coming months he will get an external hard drive and save the image on that as well but for the short term he will keep the image on the same HD (I appreciate it is a risk). I have read in 10.5 there is an app called Disk Utility in Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility that will do the trick - i.e. create the new partition. If I use this is it non destructive? I.e. will it create a new partition (2) on the HD without destroying the data (original partition (1))? As it is a new machine there will be no 'user data' to backup - but when we switch it back on we obviously want a working machine as before; but this time with an extra partition (is it called Volume in Apple World?)

Thanks

No need to do all that. All Macs come with a handy application called Time Machine. It is built into Leopard so its very useful and native.

Anyways, this application creates back-ups of your Mac every hour. So in case anything goes wrong, you can use Time Machine to go back to the moment just before the incident that wiped your data happened.

All you need is an external hard drive connected to your Mac either thru USB/Firewire or Wi-Fi. I suggest buying a Time Capsule since its a Wi-Fi router + hard drive device (2 in 1), it's Apple made and works flawlessly with OS X.

More info on Time Machine (application): Click Me
More info on Time Capsule (device): Click Me

 

[quarkrad]

Thanks. This is my plan - please advice if you think I need to change:

1. Plan to do lot of photography on Macbook (main use)
2. To purchase Western Digital Mybook (twin drive) to have RAID backup
3. Plan to back up/store photos/user data only*

* plan to store/backup physical files - not image. Why backup whole Macbook? On my win PC's I only backup user files - not complete 'snap shot' of whole PC.

 

[quarkrad]

Just had a look at time Time Machine - sorry I didn't before last post. I can see how this is good but if it is taking continuous snap shots that you can 'reload' how much disk space is this going to take?
Apologies as I am from 'win world' (although I now use Linux) - is this something like windows 'System Restore'?

 

[jav6454]

Just had a look at time Time Machine - sorry I didn't before last post. I can see how this is good but if it is taking continuous snap shots that you can 'reload' how much disk space is this going to take?
Apologies as I am from 'win world' (although I now use Linux) - is this something like windows 'System Restore'?

Time Machine is smart and continuously monitors your disc space. It will detect small changes and no changes from back-up to back-up. It will discard no change back-up copies and leave only those back-ups that contain a meaningful change (say new photos imported)

My current 1TB Western Digital drive holds information from October 2008 till today. Each month has 3-4 days listed (the days I did much changes around my Mac). The current month, July, has every day so far and for the last two days there are hourly back-ups when possible. Each passing day Time Machine evaluates the space and merges or deletes when ever needed. Still, you will never have missing files. I still find every file I have deleted and that was backed up from October '08.

It's ok, I know how confusing making a back-up in Windows is.

 

[-tWv-]

What I did for my macbook is I bought a 1TB external hard drive and partitioned it so one partition matched the internal hard drive and the rest was for time machine. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my internal hard drive onto the external matching partition. This way if there ever is a problem with my internal, I can boot from my external and try to solve the problem. Also using time machine you can restore individual files or your whole system if need be. The great thing about time machine is if you need to re-install leopard, you can use the migration assistant at the end of the leopard install to restore all your user data. So when you boot up again your computer looks exactly like it did before the leopard re-install. All settings, applications, documents, and all other data are intact and in the same place as they were before. You really don't need to partition the internal hard drive to keep another cloned backup because the chances of the internal and the external HD failing at the same time are minimal.