How Much Do You Value Your Computer?

[George]

If you answered anything resembling “A Lot” to the title question, then maybe you ought to look into protecting your real investment a little better. The hard drive is your computer, everything else is just life support and I/O for it.

Even if your data is backed up and you have all your application install discs, ask yourself this question, “How long did it take me to install and configure my computer to to the point where it is right now?” If the answer is anything over a few hours of your time, then you will see where the value in your computer really is.

If you would like a way to protect that investment in time, frustration and creativity that got your personal computer to the point that it is right now, then read on, but only if you are running Apple OSX on a Macintosh with FireWire.

The software required to make an exact clone of your Mac is free. The only cost to do this is an outboard storage device. What is required is an external FireWire drive that is at least 10% larger than the total data load on your startup hard drive. External FW drives are getting real cheap. Wall wart powered 80-120 GB drives are just over $100 nowadays and bus powered pocket FW drives are about $200 for 60-80 GB.

The software needed is called “Carbon Copy Cloner”. It is freeware and available at www.versiontracker.com. The hard drive clone copies it makes will boot and run on any Mac that can run OSX.

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

Once you have the drive mounted on your desktop and the Cloner app running, just select your startup drive as source, select the FW drive as destination, enter an Admin password, hit the clone button and wait for it to finish. It actually makes a copy of your startup drive while you are still running from your startup drive and you do not even need to quit applications, just take a coffee break while it does the job and back to work when it is done. Try doing that with any other OS.

After the clone is finished, stick the drive in your gun safe and if you ever lose your computer, you can buy another and in a little over an hour have everything back exactly as it was the day you last cloned. I do it once every two weeks on most of my machines, and always right before I travel with my PowerBook. In fact, I leave a clone at home and take another FW clone drive with me if I am going to be gone for any length of time.

I also use clones to get rental computers ready to go with full builds in just over an hour. That same task could take 10-12 hours the old way if you have a lot of apps and updates to get current and running properly.

I just recently had a client get his iBook stolen and because I had cloned his machine the week before, I had him back up and running within two hours of him buying a replacement machine at a local Apple store. The insurance covered his hardware loss, but without the clone copy, he would have faced a miserable re-configuration task and lost a lot of unrecoverable data.

I hope this info can be of some help to my fellow Mac (ab)users out there.

--

Regards,

Edited August 6, 2004 by George

[Nik Habicht]

George,

Cool! You just might get me out of PCs yet.....

[shred]

PC owners should look at Ghost, PQDI, and such-- there's no excuse. Maxtor makes a external USB/1394 HD with a one-button backup feature that's also very handy. I hadn't heard of the Mac version before, but it sounds great, especially free.

[SiG Lady]

"Ghost" is on everyone's lips as it applies to securing/retrieving your data. I'll be having a heart-to-heart with my PC guru this weekend about it.

I just finished a 4-week college course on the XP OS and it was basically nearly 4 weeks of hard drive, hard drive, hard drive. And what we can do to make it safe and duplicated.

How timely.

[raz-0]

http://www.fssdev.com/products/casperxp/

cheaper than ghost by about $20 and works like a top. I have used it a number of times when upgrading to larger disks.

Only issue is with windows XP, product activation can detect too many changes in hardware and you will have to re-activate.

Macs are not breaking new ground here, ghost and things like it have been around for ages.

[George]

Macs are not breaking new ground here, ghost and things like it have been around for ages.

Of course they are not new. These type of cloning scripts have been available in UNIX for years and are the same type of process that Commercial backup utilities like Dantz Retrospect use.

There are some major differences though, this app is “Freeware” and there are no issues with system configuration and hardware differences, it just plain works, all of the time, on any configuration, without any issues and most important of all, it’s “FREE”

--

Regards,

Edited August 7, 2004 by George

[D.Hayden]

There are some major differences though, this app is “Freeware” and there are no issues with system configuration and hardware differences, it just plain works, all of the time, on any configuration, without any issues and it’s “FREE”

--

Regards,

George... you had me with 'Free'.....

[George]

BTW, another thing that OSX and the freeware cloning scripts have going for them is universality. OSX is pretty much device independent. In other words, I can boot up older PowerBooks with a clone drive from a G5 dual proc tower running the latest graphics boards, SATA drives, etc. and it all works just like it did on the tower, only slower.

Conversely, I can boot my heavily hardware customized G4 AGP mini-tower with a clone copy of my wife’s older clamshell G3 iBook and everything works just like it did on her iBook. No configuration, anytime, on any hardware, ever.

You can move your entire user environment from a muscle-bound mini-tower, to a PowerBook, take a trip and start new projects, upgrade software, add new apps and then roll it all back into the tower right over the old original and continue right where you were on the PowerBook. You will have no configuration issues. It is like being transported into a new body, the computer opens it eyes and is exactly like it used to be on the old box, but inside all new hardware.

--

Regards,

[DJPoLo]

The software required to make an exact clone of your Mac is free.

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

Outstanding tip, George. Thanks. I have three 160GB LaCie Porche drives for data backup, but this will go a step beyond.

Thanks again,

-Chet

[benos]

Yea, thanks to George I'm all over Carbon Copy Cloner. It's awesome. And a local mac guru told me that Apple recently hired the guy that wrote it.

be

[DJPoLo]

OK, my 17" PowerBook's display is not working. I have to give it to Apple for a relacement Flux Capacitor or whatever converts the power up enuff to drive the display. Anyhoo, no biggie, pretty common fix.

Before I give it to the Apple Goons, oops techies, I want to back it up. Will Apple's "Backup" app backup EVERYTHING so that if there's a catastrophic HD failure that I can restore to 100% capacity?

-Chet