iMac Backup - question

[Dennis Peacock]

Who here has performed and recovered an iMac drive before?
I've been using TimeMachine but I'm not sure that it's backing up to where I can recover an entire disk (to include the O/S, applications, and data.

So I'm asking here because of the wide audience base at SMC.

[Jim Koepke]

The first question would be do you have your TimeMachine on an external disk?

My recollection of this is a bit fuzzy. My applications were backed up in TimeMachine when upgrading computers about 4 years ago. The operating system would need to be backed up separately if my memory is correct. It isn't too difficult to make an external drive be your boot disc.

Also not quite sure what one may have to do to be able to log into two Macintosh User Groups where there are those who can answer this question much better than me:

http://www.bostonbbs.org/

https://www.planetmug.org/

My membership on Planetmug goes back 25 years or so.

jtk

[Jim Becker]

TimeMachine makes incrementals over time to keep things efficient. You are supposed to be able to do a full restore of your "stuff" after you do what's necessary to get a drive and OS working should there be a failure. I use an external RAID for TimeMachine storage, but fortunately, have not had to leverage it to-date. (knock on ones and zeros)

[Doug Dawson]

Who here has performed and recovered an iMac drive before?
I've been using TimeMachine but I'm not sure that it's backing up to where I can recover an entire disk (to include the O/S, applications, and data.


There's an app called SuperDuper that creates an entire bootable _clone_ of your internal drive on a separate (external) drive. I do this when I get a new machine (creating a virgin copy of the original OS setup) and then store that drive, so that I can wipe back to it should I ever need to let the machine out of physical possession (service, or selling it, etc.)

On another external drive, I periodically update the clone of the current state of the internal drive, which is very quick using that app, so that I always have a fairly recent bootable clone.

I've been using SuperDuper for years, and it's never failed me. (It's not free, but it's not expensive either.)

External drives are cheap these days. TimeMachine fills in the gaps.

[roger wiegand]

I'm paranoid about backups, particularly of DW's computer as she is not happy about data loss. We use two MacBook Pro laptops and a Mac Mini.

I do continuous incremental backups to an in-house NAS and to both the NAS and an off-site server using Code 42 Crashplan. I have done multiple successful complete restores from these backups over the years, both local and remote, so have pretty good confidence in them. They back up only user files, not the system. Restoring from the remote server can take some time if you have hundreds of Gb of data. The Crashplan backup is convenient for doing a less than full restore, eg recovering a single file.

For convenience of full restores, I also run a daily incremental disk image backup using Carbon Copy Cloner to a spare hard drive on one computer and a disk image on the NAS for two others. This typically takes less than 5 min to complete unless I've done a big photo or video session that day. Restoration of the full disk image is very fast and easy, I also use it when swapping out drives and such to move the entire computer to a new physical drive. This has also been flawless, so far.

[mike stenson]

You can use both SuperDuper and CCC for free. You just don't get the more advanced functionality. Both will allow you to clone a drive. I have a crashplan backup going on all the time. It works, but restoration is painful, so in an ideal world I would clone regularly to limit the restoration delta to a more reasonable size.

From what I can recall, Time Machine is pretty similar, and it should also back up your OS stuff.. BUT, and this is a pretty big but, it requires an installed (and generally either equal or later version) to perform restoration.