Hard Drive Backups - Complete & Bootable

[EricW]

I'm a little rusty on my Mac backup procedures. Can I still attach an external hard drive and drag my drive onto it to create a 100% bootable copy of my primary hard drive?

I've bought what's probably the first of several WD MyBook hard drives and I'm thinking that I want one drive just as a DejaVu periodic backup drive, then probably another as a complete OS backup. Does Unix behave well in transferring it's OS from one drive to another or does it do any weird crap like Windows where you can't really copy a drive w/o a system level utility?

Any reports on WD drive reliability? I know to stay away from the Maxtors like the plague.

Thanks!

[raz-0]

I don't know about the current state of OS X and making a copy like that, but I have been pretty happy with my WD drives.

I'm getting 5+ years of service out of them. They are rated at 5 years MTBF, but MTBF is pretty much a load of bull with everything. However, some of the folks I've installed them in are only getting 3 and change which is basically a little past their warrenty.

The main difference is I am scrupulous about regulalry servicing my PC and keeping airflow and temps in line, the folks I build stuff for seem to have some sort of stealth direct feed mechanism for shoving a whole cat into the various cooling apparatus.

Out of 10 or so drives I put in and know their status since 2002 (when I switched over to WD after getting burned by a whole bunch of deathstars), only 2 have died. Both in machines with heat problems bad enough to also kill the PSU.

Oddly enough, with all manufacturers, you want to stay away from the retail packaged drives. They all seem to only come with a 1 year warranty and are the bottom of the barrel for longevity compared to what is in theory the exact same part ordered OEM. (hold two side by side, and you will usually see that CLEARLY isn't the case regardless of what the model number says, or that they have different places of manufacture)

Seagates seem to be doing ok these days as well, and have greatly improved their behavior with regards to noise recently in certain models. At work we seem to go through about two a month, but that's from storage arrays adding up to about 16 terrabytes of disk that get used heavily. With the higher areal densities of drives these days, they are all more prone to failure it seems real world MTBF appears to be shrinking, so you can only get so good. Real world MTBF is probably about 12 months with roughly 50% eating it at 6 months or less and 50% eating it at 2+ years.

Hitachi is basically making the deathstar line that IBM used to be responsible for. They still suck.

No idea with regards to fujitsu and samsung.

[SLM]

Here at home I've had 6 drives die. 5 WD's and a Maxtor. One of the WD's didn't live long enough to format it, less than 5 minutes! I avoid them totally now. Seagate or Hitachi is all I'll buy with preference given to Seagate. I've never had a Seagate or Hitachi drive die.

[CenTX]

Under OS 9 you could just drag copy everything over to another drive and it would be bootable. However, with OS X that changed, drag copies will not work. You have to use a utility program such as Carbon Copy Cloner. I know that you can boot off an external firewire drive. I don't know if you can boot a Mac off an external USB drive.,

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

[benos]

I'm a little rusty on my Mac backup procedures. Can I still attach an external hard drive and drag my drive onto it to create a 100% bootable copy of my primary hard drive?

I've bought what's probably the first of several WD MyBook hard drives and I'm thinking that I want one drive just as a DejaVu periodic backup drive, then probably another as a complete OS backup. Does Unix behave well in transferring it's OS from one drive to another or does it do any weird crap like Windows where you can't really copy a drive w/o a system level utility?

Any reports on WD drive reliability? I know to stay away from the Maxtors like the plague.

Thanks!

Eric,

You definitely do not want to drag-and-drop back up in OSX.

Down the app Carbon Copy Cloner from versiontracker:

http://www.versiontracker.com/php/qs.php?m...l&submit=Go

It will clone a perfect, bootable copy of your hard drive onto a FW drive, or to another partition on your main drive.

When you get the new drive, plug it in and format it with Apple's Disc Utility. When Disc Utility launches, select the new drives icon, then click "erase." The "volume format" should be set to "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)". If George (Geoff Linder) were answering right now, he tell you to click "security options" then select "Zero Out Data" - then "erase." So I guess I have to tell you that too. (It takes A LOT longer to format the disct that way. But it's the best way to do it because it maps and isolates any bad sectors, which prevents data from ever being written to them.)

Then to clone, before you launch CCC, launch Disc Utility and select your machine's drive and click "repair permissions." After that's done, if you really want to insure the quality of your clone (especially if went to the trouble to zero out data), you should also run a drive check/repair in "single user" mode. To do that, restart, then after the startup gong immediately hold down the Command (Apple) and the "S" keys - and keep your eye on the monitor. As soon as it boots into what looks like DOS screen, release both keys. When the text stops appearing - wait another minute just to be sure "it's done," then type exactly: fsck -yf

... and hit the return key. This will check and make any disc repairs, if necessary. When it tells you that your drive appears to be okay, type: reboot

... and hit the return key. In a moment you'll be back booted up as normal.

Now launch CCC, select the source drive, select the target drive, then select "preferences" and make sure "run permissions repair" is not checked (because you just used Disc Utility to do that), and that "make bootable" is checked. Then click "Clone" -enter your PW and you'll end up with an exact copy of your entire drive on your new backup drive.

And a cool thing about CCC is that you can be actually working on your computer while it's cloning. That's kind of nuts.

be

[EricW]

Thanks Brian! That is huge. I completely forgot about the disk utility and have no clue what fsck is, but I'll do it!

Take two SoCo's out of petty cash...

[bgary]

have no clue what fsck is

It is Unix-speak for "file system check". The big difference between OS-9 and OS-X is that all previous Mac OSs were in-house/proprietary code, OS-X is built on a unix kernel...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X

b

[EricW]

Oookay, that that explains why the drag and drop boot went away. Thanks Brucie!

[benos]

Instead of running fsck -yf, you can Verify Drive in Disc Utility. But according to Geoff that isn't as reliable as running fsck. At first it's a little scary but once you do it a couple times you'll be all over it.

be