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- Your Mac's Specs
- MBP 13" mid 2009 2.26GHz 4GB 1066MHz 250GB OS X 10.10.1
I've had a MacBook Pro for 5 years and haven't backed up a bit, a nibble, a byte - anything, and I've dropped it onto hard ground (switched off) twice such that the casing has been dented at corners. That was over two years ago and the machine hasn't missed a heartbeat, so I've seemingly got an indestructible machine with a solidly constructed hard drive. However, for no particular reason, I'm now looking into wasting a bit of time in, perhaps, doing something I've never done - backing up. (This is my first machine.)
Now, I know of Time Machine, and by reading some of the forum threads I gather it only backs up non-OS data, and that may not be good enough if you need to restore your system to a state exactly as it was before the presumed disaster. To do that you must make an exact copy of the hdd (clone) by using software such as SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner, and an advantage of using such a cloner is that such copies are bootable, by which term I presume is meant that, in some way, you tell your stricken machine that the installed hdd is to be bypassed and instead look to the cloned copy for the software and data to bring the OS to life. By the way, I have seen it pointed out that Time Machine does not produce bootable copies, but that is obviously because it does not even back up any of the OS anyway.
But even if you could choose the OS files to be backed up by Time Machine, possibly by making them unhidden, I suspect that such a backup would not be bootable since, I think (and this is the essential difference between a bootable and non-bootable copy), a bootable copy has to have certain basic system data in certain initial storage areas of the backing up media - e.g. sector 0 of track 0 of disc 0 if it were an hdd - and since Time Machine has been designed to only copy non-OS data (notwithstanding my earlier conjecture about possibly choosing unhidden system files) then the designers would not have to put any data anywhere in particular on the backup medium, so would not be able to produce a bootable target.
Speak out if anything I've said here is wrong or if you can comment or embellish further. There are some implicit questions that I've posed, for example about how to get the machine to look elsewhere for the bootable system, so I hope someone with that knowledge can answer that question.
By the way, if it matters, my OS is Mavericks, v10.9.4.
Now, I know of Time Machine, and by reading some of the forum threads I gather it only backs up non-OS data, and that may not be good enough if you need to restore your system to a state exactly as it was before the presumed disaster. To do that you must make an exact copy of the hdd (clone) by using software such as SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner, and an advantage of using such a cloner is that such copies are bootable, by which term I presume is meant that, in some way, you tell your stricken machine that the installed hdd is to be bypassed and instead look to the cloned copy for the software and data to bring the OS to life. By the way, I have seen it pointed out that Time Machine does not produce bootable copies, but that is obviously because it does not even back up any of the OS anyway.
But even if you could choose the OS files to be backed up by Time Machine, possibly by making them unhidden, I suspect that such a backup would not be bootable since, I think (and this is the essential difference between a bootable and non-bootable copy), a bootable copy has to have certain basic system data in certain initial storage areas of the backing up media - e.g. sector 0 of track 0 of disc 0 if it were an hdd - and since Time Machine has been designed to only copy non-OS data (notwithstanding my earlier conjecture about possibly choosing unhidden system files) then the designers would not have to put any data anywhere in particular on the backup medium, so would not be able to produce a bootable target.
Speak out if anything I've said here is wrong or if you can comment or embellish further. There are some implicit questions that I've posed, for example about how to get the machine to look elsewhere for the bootable system, so I hope someone with that knowledge can answer that question.
By the way, if it matters, my OS is Mavericks, v10.9.4.