Booting from backup FW drive
Booting from backup FW drive
booting from backup HD

jassdjassd
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
After losing the HD on my new G5 last Fall, I decided to buy a backup FW drive. Purchased a LaCie FW800 160GB drive an have been doing incremental backups using LaCie Silverlining SW on a regular basis. I foolishly assumed the the backup drive would be bootable. Testing shows otherwise and a call to LaCie confirmed that drive won't be bootable unless the OS is "installed" on the drive - not just copied to it. Is their a SW solution that will perform incremental backups and retain bootability on backup drive.



I could continue with incrementals and in the case of catostrophic failure of main drive install new OS on backup drive from CD but in this case would I over writing various preferences etc.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 1
    vandewaalsvandewaals Posts: 450member
    If the FW drive is the same size as your internal drive, you could just clone your installation onto the FW drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. CCC lets you synchronize the two disks, and even schedule the backups. And it preserves all the permissions. Basically, I can boot off my drive and not even realize its the FW and not the internal. CCC is indispensable for a Mac OS X user.





    Additional Edit: If the FW drive is BIGGER, you can do like I did and partition the FW drive into 2 volumes. One is the size of my internal drive and is where I clone my full installation. I also use Apple's Backup app to do incremental backups onto the other volume (you could use the LaCie software you were already using for this). That way you have an emergency boot volume and can still do small backups in between clones of your full install. I only update my clone volume just before software updates, just in case something gets hosed. That way I can restore my previous setup very easily.
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