backing up osx mountain lion on a USB stick from a preinstalled copy

Hi Mac users

I have recently bought a mini mac with a preloaded version of mountain lion.

Does anyone know how I can make a FULL back up of mountain lion on a usb stick in case I want to wipe my hardrive and reinstall osx 10.8. I have found info on the internet which tells me how to make a back up from an upgrade file downloaded from the apple store but this doesn't work for me as I have a preloaded copy.

Hope someone can help.

Cheers

G'day and welcome to the forums.

The time to make a USB thumb drive with ML installed is prior to running the Installer. The pre-loaded copy is not actually yours but belongs to the person who purchased it from the App Store. Lion and Mountain Lion are different in that the operating system always belongs to the App Store ID Account. In short his/her (the seller) download is his/hers and never yours. Mavericks OS X.9 is due out in a couple of months. If you purchase that after establishing an Apple ID and account, use LionDiskMaker to make the thumb drive before installing.

In the interim if you have problems you can access Mountain Lion Recovery.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718

@OP Even if the copy of Mountain Lion was pre-loaded on a Mac purchased from Apple a full backup of such an installation would take a fairly high capacity stick drive. I don't recall the exact size at the moment. Much easier to get a hard drive and use that.

Okay thanks guys. I don't like how Apple is making it really hard to get a back up version of the software but I can wait for the new version and just have the recovery tools on usb in the short term.

Cheers

They don't make it hard at all. You have Time Machine, which contains a full backup of your entire HD, you have a Recovery Partition that can restore your system, and if the HD goes south you have Internet Recovery of the system.

By my count that's three times more backups than most people have of their system, and likely to be at least one extra backup option beyond what most of us had pre-Lion.

And if that is not sufficient cloning software such as SuperDuper is also available for cloning the drive to an external.