Starting up from a Time-Machine drive

[MarkW19]

I used to back up using Super Duper, which made a carbon copy of my startup disk, so that I could start up from my back up disk if anything happened (physically) to my primary HD.

Can the same be done with the disk I use to back up with Time Machine, can I start up from it? If so, how?

 

[rdowns]

No, TM is not a bootable drive.

 

[MarkW19]

That's annoying. So if my HD fails, I'm basically left without a computer!

I've used Time Machine once since getting Leopard on 29th Oct, to recover something irrelevant.

Maybe I should go back to my old method...

 

[rdowns]

FWIW, I do a SD backup a few times a month on a partition on my external drive and use TM on another partition on same drive. While I haven't needed TM, it does work rather nicely at restoring files.

 

[maccompaq]

I used to back up using Super Duper, which made a carbon copy of my startup disk, so that I could start up from my back up disk if anything happened (physically) to my primary HD.

Can the same be done with the disk I use to back up with Time Machine, can I start up from it? If so, how?

Just use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to again create your bootable backup HD.

 

[MarkW19]

I'd need to create another partition on the same drive (I only have 2 drives) to use Super Duper on, wouldn't I? And sadly the drive is full as it is!

 

[72930]

I'd need to create another partition on the same drive (I only have 2 drives) to use Super Duper on, wouldn't I? And sadly the drive is full as it is!

Looks like TM isn't for you...

 

[TimJim]

If your drive get's screwed up, you can restore it with TM but it's not bootable.

Bootable copies are made with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!

 

[maccompaq]

I'd need to create another partition on the same drive (I only have 2 drives) to use Super Duper on, wouldn't I? And sadly the drive is full as it is!

If your hard drive is almost full, you might consider getting an external Firewire drive and then use SuperDuper to clone the internal HD to it.

 

[Virgil-TB2]

That's annoying. So if my HD fails, I'm basically left without a computer!

I've used Time Machine once since getting Leopard on 29th Oct, to recover something irrelevant.

Maybe I should go back to my old method...

You can use Time Machine to restore all your stuff, just in a different way though. And I would bet that the amount of time it takes you would be almost identical to what it would take with the other method.

If TM was bootable, you still would have to copy all your stuff back to your main drive and reconstruct it as you can't use, (and no one would really expect to use), the TM drive as the main hard drive from that point forward.

So the procedure there would be:

- boot from TM (if you could)
- spend X hours copying the stuff back to the main drive

With TM the way it actually is (non-bootable):

- boot from Leopard CD and pick TM as source of old data
- spend X hours copying the stuff onto the main drive

Personally, I don't see the difference.

I mean, obviously there is a difference, but it's like the difference between a brown horse and a black horse IMO.