Disaster recovery for a powerbook?

I've just taken the plunge and ordered a 17" powerbook. I'm experienced with PCs, but am new to OSX. With a new PC notebook, I usually use a disk imaging utility to image the drive, so that if I break anything during setup, it's easy to recover.

With my new Powerbook, I figure I'm even more likely to get into trouble with experimenting, so I'm looking for any advice on how to recover/rollback a powerbook to a previous good configuration, or any software that I can use to image the entire drive before I start playing around.

Thanks!

The CDs that come with your powerbook are restore CDs. Which you can use to been your system back to the factory defaults. You would have to use some other method if you want to have a back up of your system while you are making changes.

MacOS seems basically impossible to break, it's *not* Windows

Even if you do somehow manage to break it (maybe by doing something daft in the terminal) you can just 'Archive and Install' and everything will work again, everything will be there still etc (see my thread 'More and more impressed' in this forum). Each user generally has their own settings so you could just create a new user if you want to reset the settings.

However, I believe Apple's .Mac product comes with backup software.

The system files in OS X are protected from the user unlike windows. sure, if you really wanna hack it, customized it and try wrecking it, you can. Everything has permission levels and any changes that you make, you be asked for permission to confirm changes.

The restore CD give you the ability to install and replace the OS or archive your home/user directory then install.

For back up purposes, you can either use the above method or You can just drag/copy your data files to another partition for safe keeping. Then later, drag them back to the exact directory afterwards. The Mac OS is intelligent enough to understand what you have done.


Your AddressBook entries are all stored in one place.

Users > (username) > Library > Application Support > AddressBook


Your BookMarks entries are all stored in one place.

Users > (username) > Library > Application Support > Safari


Basically speaking, all your application data and preferences is in:

Users > (username) > Library

Carbon Copy Cloner is a utility to clone Mac systems...useful if you have a custom OS setup that you'd like to preserve, or if you want to do a full backup of System, Applications, and your documents.

Some people also use it to distribute a single custom OS/Application image across multiple machines

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/13260

Thanks for the info everyone. I guess backup/repair tends to be a lot easier when you don't have to deal with the windows registry.

Windows 3.1 used .ini files, like a primitive xml file, for all the settings. I never did know why they stepped backwards from those to that horrible registry idea *shrugs*