hard drive backup

what would be the best way too make a complete copy of my hard drive, OS and all, to have as an emergency backup for if my hard drive failed ? external ?

Use a mac with at least Leopard 10.5.8 and use Time Machine. Hook up an external hard drive and tell Time Machine to back up to it.

If it ever fails, boot to your Leopard install disk, and choose to restore from a time machine backup.

Another option is to use Carbon Copy Cloner which allows you to make a bootable copy of your HD.
http://www.bombich.com/index.html

Or ... Make a bootable clone of your hard drive using SuperDuper!
SuperDuper!

Also, have a look at this sticky.
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/sw...official-backup-faq-start-backing-up-now.html

Hope this helps.

Cheers ... McBie

And Carbon Copy Cloner was just updated yesterday to now include cloning the hidden Lion Recovery partition.

I use both Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner just for good measure. ;D

Cloning is much better as either CC or SuperDuper will make a complete copy on to the external hard drive and this will then be bootable. Time Machine is not bootable

harryb2448 said:

Cloning is much better as either CC or SuperDuper will make a complete copy on to the external hard drive and this will then be bootable. Time Machine is not bootable

Click to expand...

I wouldn't say it's better, I would just say that it's more convenient. Time machine uses versioning so you can restore back to specific periods of time. If you do something to jack up your Mac OS X install and clone it over, then both are jacked. It's faster to get up and running with a cloned disk, but safer to use time machine.

Using both is obviously the best way to go.

And Time Machine is still not bootable.

harryb2448 said:

And Time Machine is still not bootable.

Click to expand...

I never claimed that it was, and you already stated that it wasn't.

I'm literally in the middle of doing this very thing right this second. Just got my OWC 2TB drive - and made 3 partitions. 1 for TM backup, 1 for the current SL clone and 1 for the future Lion clone.

My MBP has a similar setup on its own external.

Yes - I should have had the iMac backed up long ago - but I was convinced that I'd be getting a Thunderbolt drive - until they came out and cost as much as they do.

all right no more arguing, any way what i did for now is use CCC and copy my 1st 750Gb hard drive to my second 750Gb hard, it was bare. so now i have two startup disks. no sure if this was the right way to backup my drive but seemed good at the time.