Ghost alternative?

I want to make a full backup of my Mac OS partition and save it on my pc (that i have demoted to storage slave) so that I can restore it from the OS X DVDs (for school, ive put way too much stuff on my mac and I need it totally clean). On my PC I would make a ghost image, but is there something similar for mac?

SuperDuper!

The backup software for the Mac.

Do a search, you'll find much about this great software already on the forum.

I agree, I used SuperDuper when I upgraded the hard drive on my MacBook. It was really excellent.

See also CarbonCopy, which is similar. You can see more at:

http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

the home page for this package.

Why does noone EVER mention Disk Utility?!.

mattblack said:

Why does noone EVER mention Disk Utility?!.

Click to expand...

Because traditional Windows mentality is to use a program like Ghost that creates an image of your hard drive. This is essentially what Disk Utility does. But it doesn't give you the kind of flexibility that SuperDuper and CCC do. SuperDuper not only creates a clone of your disk file-for-file that can be easily accessed offline, it also makes the backup bootable. The nice thing about that is that if your hard drive goes belly up, you can be back up and running immediately by simply booting off your external drive. It also does incremental backups - so you don't have to always do a full backup (which takes a long time), you can just back up the files that have been added or changed, while still maintaining the integrity of the backup.

SuperDuper was one of the first Mac programs I bought.

I have various OS X systems in differing configurations.

cwa107 said:

Because traditional Windows mentality is to use a program like Ghost that creates an image of your hard drive. This is essentially what Disk Utility does. But it doesn't give you the kind of flexibility that SuperDuper and CCC do. SuperDuper not only creates a clone of your disk file-for-file that can be easily accessed offline, it also makes the backup bootable. The nice thing about that is that if your hard drive goes belly up, you can be back up and running immediately by simply booting off your external drive. It also does incremental backups - so you don't have to always do a full backup (which takes a long time), you can just back up the files that have been added or changed, while still maintaining the integrity of the backup.

Click to expand...

I think you will find that creating a DU DMG/cloning with DU, makes the backup bootable also; how do I know?... I have done it about 20 times, and tested every conceivable combination. I backed up my Macbook drive last night, wiped out the internal drive and restored it from the partition I backed it up to, using DU.

DU has NEVER failed me - I just can't see why people don't ever mention it. It makes it bootable of course, otherwise what would be the point in using it to backup a whole drive?. Did you not realise?.

mattblack said:

I think you will find that creating a DU DMG/cloning with DU, makes the backup bootable also; how do I know?... I have done it about 20 times, and tested every conceivable combination. I backed up my Macbook drive last night, wiped out the internal drive and restored it from the partition I backed it up to, using DU.

DU has NEVER failed me - I just can't see why people don't ever mention it. It makes it bootable of course, otherwise what would be the point in using it to backup a whole drive?. Did you not realise?.

Click to expand...

I guess I never really thought about it. Assuming I create a DMG of my entire system disk, and I store that DMG file on an external hard drive. If I were to lose my hard drive, how would I mount the DMG file (again, keeping in mind that I don't have another computer to use to either burn the DMG to a disc or extract it to another drive).

cwa107 said:

I guess I never really thought about it. Assuming I create a DMG of my entire system disk, and I store that DMG file on an external hard drive. If I were to lose my hard drive, how would I mount the DMG file (again, keeping in mind that I don't have another computer to use to either burn the DMG to a disc or extract it to another drive).

Click to expand...

I find it best to restore the OS to a drive/partition, not to a DMG. This way, you can boot from it without any delay, and you ONLY need the external drive. This is what I did last night; a wise proposition.

mattblack said:

I find it best to restore the OS to a drive/partition, not to a DMG. This way, you can boot from it without any delay, and you ONLY need the external drive. This is what I did last night; a wise proposition.

Click to expand...

Got it - I suppose that would work. I haven't given it a try yet (always been a SuperDuper user), butI'll have to check that out next time.

cwa107 said:

Got it - I suppose that would work. I haven't given it a try yet (always been a SuperDuper user), butI'll have to check that out next time.

Click to expand...

Of course it works - that's the whole point of DU!.

mattblack said:

Why does noone EVER mention Disk Utility?!.

Click to expand...

Don't think most mention disk utility because it is a fully manual solution with no way to do automatic incremental backups. Even doing a manual incremental backup is not truly incremental, because you would have to go in and backup entire folders. Even most of the sites that describe how to create backups in this way with Disk Utility, also recommend erasing and creating a new full backup once every month or two.

I would not use a backup solution that is fully manual myself. Don't believe most of us would recommend a fully manual backup solution for users that we know little about their computer habits. And I think, most users new to creating backups (and most asking the question truly are), want a set it and forget it / automatic solution, with true incremental backups.