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Backing up an iMac.
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Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2007-07-23, 08:23

Quote:
Originally Posted by rasmits View Post
You already have an up-to-date backup of your system folder: your software restore DVD.
Bingo. And if you want to have a backup of the recent software updates, you can download the combo update and any others from Apple and save those to another drive/disc.

The quality of this board depends on the quality of the posts. The only way to guarantee thoughtful, informative discussion is to write thoughtful, informative posts. AppleNova is not a real-time chat forum. You have time to compose messages and edit them before and after posting.
  quote
MCSE+I-Turncoat
Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
 
2007-07-23, 08:26

Quote:
Originally Posted by beardedmacuser View Post
or theft. If someone steals your computer they'll surely grab an external drive sitting in the same room too.
And on that line of thinking I keep my backup CD’s in my car. Now I could keep an external hard drive in my car to but I live in the south east and I park my car outside in the sun where it’s routinely 90 degrees for 120 days a year. So the temperature in the car might be 120 to 130 F all day.

I suppose I could rent a large safety deposit box for say $120 a year and get two external drives and rotate them to the bank every day.

It’s been 12 years. When is Microsoft going to make a browser that works?
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rasmits
rams it
 
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Seattle
 
2007-07-23, 08:36

Quote:
Originally Posted by MCSE+I-Turncoat View Post
I suppose I could rent a large safety deposit box for say $120 a year and get two external drives and rotate them to the bank every day.
Okay now you have to please tell me you're joking.

Are you reading anything we're trying to tell you? There's almost no point in backing up your system folder, let alone every freaking day.

It doesn't change.

Further, locking it inside a safety deposit box makes about as much sense as locking up your mouse. There's nothing critical, nothing important, nothing personal in the system folder.

You had me at asl
.......
  quote
torifile
Less than Stellar Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Durham, NC
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2007-07-23, 08:53

Quote:
Originally Posted by rasmits View Post
Okay now you have to please tell me you're joking.

Are you reading anything we're trying to tell you? There's almost no point in backing up your system folder, let alone every freaking day.

It doesn't change.

Further, locking it inside a safety deposit box makes about as much sense as locking up your mouse. There's nothing critical, nothing important, nothing personal in the system folder.
Quoted for emphasis.
  quote
Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2007-07-23, 09:01

Quote:
Originally Posted by rasmits View Post
Okay now you have to please tell me you're joking.

Are you reading anything we're trying to tell you? There's almost no point in backing up your system folder, let alone every freaking day.

It doesn't change.

Further, locking it inside a safety deposit box makes about as much sense as locking up your mouse. There's nothing critical, nothing important, nothing personal in the system folder.
Doubly quoted for emphasis.

Post of the Day™
  quote
beardedmacuser
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: eastmidlandshire
 
2007-07-23, 09:19

Quote:
Originally Posted by rasmits View Post
Okay now you have to please tell me you're joking.

Are you reading anything we're trying to tell you? There's almost no point in backing up your system folder, let alone every freaking day.

It doesn't change.

Further, locking it inside a safety deposit box makes about as much sense as locking up your mouse. There's nothing critical, nothing important, nothing personal in the system folder.
Absolutely.

If you really really really want to backup your OS, then clone an image of your drive to another drive. Then you could quickly re-clone everything back to your iMac should you need to. But if you're going to all the hassle of booting from the install DVD to run Disk Utility to restore the drive, then it's kind of hard to justify the effort when you could just re-install from the DVD and save all the time and effort backing-up the OS in the first place.
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Fahrenheit
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2005
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2007-07-23, 09:53

Quote:
Originally Posted by rasmits View Post
Okay now you have to please tell me you're joking.

Are you reading anything we're trying to tell you? There's almost no point in backing up your system folder, let alone every freaking day.

It doesn't change.

Further, locking it inside a safety deposit box makes about as much sense as locking up your mouse. There's nothing critical, nothing important, nothing personal in the system folder.
All of the water-cooler gang are quoting you, so I suppose I wil do to look cool.

Last edited by Fahrenheit : 2007-07-23 at 10:30.
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Gargoyle
http://ga.rgoyle.com
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: In your dock hiding behind your finder icon!
 
2007-07-23, 15:19

Quote:
Originally Posted by rasmits View Post
Okay now you have to please tell me you're joking.

Are you reading anything we're trying to tell you? There's almost no point in backing up your system folder, let alone every freaking day.

It doesn't change.

Further, locking it inside a safety deposit box makes about as much sense as locking up your mouse. There's nothing critical, nothing important, nothing personal in the system folder.
Ok, I'll join in!
  quote
rasmits
rams it
 
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Seattle
 
2007-07-23, 15:23

Quote:
Originally Posted by Gargoyle View Post
For the love of god man! Please backup now or tell us you use some sort of RAID storage...

[snip]
You totally threw off the groove!

Quote:
Originally Posted by rasmits
Okay now you have to please tell me you're joking.

Are you reading anything we're trying to tell you? There's almost no point in backing up your system folder, let alone every freaking day.

It doesn't change.

Further, locking it inside a safety deposit box makes about as much sense as locking up your mouse. There's nothing critical, nothing important, nothing personal in the system folder.
There.
  quote
Gargoyle
http://ga.rgoyle.com
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: In your dock hiding behind your finder icon!
 
2007-07-23, 15:29

Rasmits, don't know what you mean!
  quote
Boomerangmacuser
Member
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Vancouver, BC
 
2007-07-23, 16:45

Forget the car. Friend, neighbor, office??? I have an external enclosure and 2 HDD's left over from old machines. I rotate the drives between home and work. I backup everything (the complete opposite of what you're asking) because I HATE reinstalling apps one at a time.
  quote
World Leader Pretend
Ruling teh World
 
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Boston, MA
 
2007-07-23, 19:35

Hmmmm,,,,, I read this entire thread and I am very confused why MCSE is so obsessed with daily backups. I mean, I make a backup of my music and photos maybe once every few months onto a DVD, but not my system folders or anything.

This just makes me confused.
  quote
torifile
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2007-07-24, 21:19

Did we scare MCSE off?
  quote
AWR
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: State of Flux
 
2007-07-25, 02:59

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad View Post

No, they're telling you that its senseless to create a backup to a partition on the same drive because if the drive fails, you're going to lose your backup and this whole exercise would have been for naught.

OMG, what happened!! Brad's on another meth bender - probably day three considering the typo on his main pet grammar issue. Honorable Mention for Post of the Day.

I can't believe I just read this whole thread!! It probably should have been locked down after several posts. Perhaps it was kept open for its comedy value.
  quote
MCSE+I-Turncoat
Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
 
2007-08-02, 19:21

Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad View Post
Why go to all the trouble of backing up just the OS when it's fairly simple to reinstall from the original discs? Your 5 hour turnaround time is abnormally very long for a typical reinstall.
Actually I found the reinstall time for the base install is about 3 hours. Then it’s an hour or more to tweak the OS back to where I like it and to install all the updates and such.

It’s been 12 years. When is Microsoft going to make a browser that works?
  quote
Ryan
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Promise Land of Trustafarians
 
2007-08-02, 19:29

Quote:
Originally Posted by MCSE+I-Turncoat View Post
Actually I found the reinstall time for the base install is about 3 hours. Then it’s an hour or more to tweak the OS back to where I like it and to install all the updates and such.
Three hours? I've never had a reinstall take that long, and I'm on an old G4 PowerBook.
  quote
MCSE+I-Turncoat
Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
 
2007-08-02, 19:56

What I ended up doing was this:

I Used the disk utility from the Mac OS X install disk 1 to partition the drive into three partitions. They are:
1. Mac OS X = 120 GB.
2. Backup = 92 GB.
3. Super Duper = 19.16 GB.

The partitioning wiped all three partitions clean so I reloaded the OS from the install disks and tweaked the OS out. I downloaded Super Duper for free and made a clone working bootable copy of the OS to the Super Duper partition. Then I made and image file backup to the Backup partition from the Mac OS X main partition. There is enough room for 4 backups on the backup partition.

So now any time I want to role the main installation back all I have to do is boot into the Super Duper partition and use the disk utility to erase the Mac OS X partition and load the image file and then use Super Duper to restore an older copy of the OS.

The neat thing is that I can set the main OS to boot into the Super Duper OS by going to System Preferences, Startup Disk or in the event of a crashed or hung OS, Unplugging and plugging the iMac back in and holding down the Option key brings up a screen where I can select what bootable partition I want to boot to. This eliminates the need for the original install disks.

This also means that with PC Anywhere the iMac can be fixed from a remote location over the Internet if there is a person around that is smart enough to unplug the iMac and plug it back in and hold down the options key and make an OS selection with the mouse.

Super Duper costs $27.95 but the free editions is fully functional for full copies. To make a full copy or do a full restore takes 40 minutes on my system. If one purchases the full copy of Super Duper, Super Duper can update a backup image file which should take vastly less time. Super Duper can schedule an automatic weekly backup.

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDup...scription.html

Thanks for all the pleasant support folks.

And for those that don’t believe in backup up at all, good luck.

It’s been 12 years. When is Microsoft going to make a browser that works?
  quote
tomoe
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2006
 
2007-08-02, 20:34

Reading this Byzantine strategy, all I can think of is....

"I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!"

-Mugatu,Zoolander
  quote
Ryan
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Promise Land of Trustafarians
 
2007-08-02, 20:37

Quote:
Originally Posted by MCSE+I-Turncoat View Post
What I ended up doing was this:

-snip-

Thanks for all the pleasant support folks.

And for those that don’t believe in backup up at all, good luck.
And we *still* have no idea why you did this.
  quote
AsLan^
Not a tame lion...
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Narnia
 
2007-08-02, 22:55

It's not a bad implementation for a system restore type capability.

That being said, it would certainly be prudent to also keep a full backup on an external drive.
  quote
kieran
@kk@pennytucker.social
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
 
2007-08-02, 23:03

I'm still lost as to why you would want a backup on the same disk?
  quote
rasmits
rams it
 
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Seattle
 
2007-08-03, 05:19

Oh sweet Jesus...

*head to wall*
  quote
chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
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2007-08-03, 05:41

Quote:
Originally Posted by MCSE+I-Turncoat View Post
The neat thing is that I can set the main OS to boot into the Super Duper OS by going to System Preferences, Startup Disk or in the event of a crashed or hung OS, Unplugging and plugging the iMac back in and holding down the Option key brings up a screen where I can select what bootable partition I want to boot to.
The other neat thing is that, in the event of a hard drive crash, you're not just screwed, but doubly so.
  quote
Fooboy
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2005
 
2007-08-03, 09:38

Why don't you just get an a nice external hard drive w/ Firewire and be done with it.

By making your back up on the same drive in your system ... it's like making a photocopy of your credit cards in case you ever lost them, but keeping the photocopies in your wallet!
  quote
Wyatt
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Near Indianapolis
 
2007-08-03, 09:44

Quote:
Originally Posted by kieran23kk View Post
I'm still lost as to why you would want a backup on the same disk?
Quote:
Originally Posted by rasmits View Post
Oh sweet Jesus...

*head to wall*
Quote:
Originally Posted by chucker View Post
The other neat thing is that, in the event of a hard drive crash, you're not just screwed, but doubly so.
This definitely qualifies as one of the strangest threads we've had in a long time. I have to agree with everybody else. WTF?
  quote
rasmits
rams it
 
Join Date: Oct 2004
Location: Seattle
 
2007-08-03, 10:09



In the event of a hard drive failure everything on your hard drive will be gone!!!!!

Every partition will be gone!!!!

YOUR BACK UP WILL BE GONE!!!!


And again:

WHY DO YOU WANT TO BACK UP YOUR SYSTEM FOLDER SO DAMN MUCH????!!!! IT DOESN'T CHANGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You had me at asl
.......

Last edited by rasmits : 2007-08-03 at 10:21.
  quote
kieran
@kk@pennytucker.social
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
 
2007-08-03, 10:19

seconded. I'm lost as to why you think this would be an effective backup solution.
  quote
chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: near Bremen, Germany
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2007-08-03, 10:19

Quote:
Originally Posted by rasmits View Post
In the event of a hard drive failure everything on your hard drive will be gone!!!!!

Every partition will be gone!!!!

YOUR BACK UP WILL BE GONE!!!!


And again:

WHY DO YOU WANT TO BACK UP YOUR SYSTEM FOLDER SO DAMN MUCH????!!!! IT DOESN'T CHANGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Breathe, man. Breathe.

Last edited by chucker : 2007-08-03 at 10:37.
  quote
kieran
@kk@pennytucker.social
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
 
2007-08-03, 10:27

Image dink doesn't work Chucker.

Edit: Now it does.

Last edited by kieran : 2007-08-03 at 11:35.
  quote
zippy
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: Unknown
 
2007-08-03, 11:21

Here's the one situation where I think that scenario would actually be useful:

If you had a bunch of computers in a classroom environment and you wanted a quick way to set them back to their normal configuration after you've had a bunch of students hacking away at them. After each training session, you go around and kick a restore off on each one.

But for data that you actually want or need to keep in case of crash? That needs an external repository.

Do you know where children get all of their energy? - They suck it right out of their parents!
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