[Blackhorse]

What is the best software for me to backup to an external HD? On sys 10.4.11.

[DMurray431]

You could always update to Leopard with time machine that is built in. It works automatically and with third party free software you can set the times & number of back-ups you want.

[sandbag1]

I cast my vote for SuperDuper.

It does something that Time Machine doesn't. It creates a bootable copy on your external hard drive. If the internal goes belly up, no problem. Just run the Mac from the bootable backup and it will be just like your original drive until you can get that problem fixed.

Time Machine is great for what it does, but you can't boot from it.

[Blackhorse]

SuperDuper looks to be just that for me. Anyone else want to chime in?

[grimlosh]

Blackhorse said:

SuperDuper looks to be just that for me. Anyone else want to chime in?

As a Tiger user... I have to agree that Super Duper is the way to go if you are looking to clone a bootable backup. The free version will only copy the entire hard drive. The shareware version will allow you to do selective updates.

I keep a partitioned external firewire hard drive with a backed up copy of my OS...AND... all my software ( adobe cs3, games, etc. ) on one of the partitions. I made the HD copy right after I did a fresh installation of all my professional software the last time I wiped my HD. Now, if I need to initialize and reinstall on my work computer, all I have to do is wipe the drive, and clone the virgin OS / software install back onto my working machine. All licenses and passkeys are already entered and I don't have to spend days wondering If I forgot to put back one of those handy little third party utilities that I use once in a blue moon.

A fresh OS and software install used to take me all weekend to get everything right. After Super Duper, I can initialize and reinstall in under 3 hours. Heck, it takes that long just to do a fresh install of CS3 master suite!

A friend of mine swears by Carbon Copy Cloner and it is freeware



> Thanks for your response on the backup question. I
> just bought a Seagate FreeAgent drive. How do I
> partition it??
>
> Thanks,
> BlackHorse


Hey BlackHorse

I'm using Tiger OS on an older iBook and this is the way I do it...

First a warning... This will wipe out all the extra software that comes with your new Seagate so make a backup if you might want to format it back to fat16 (I think it's fat16) and use all that nifty software for use on a windows machine in the future. Refer to the Seagate home page to make sure there is no special method that mac users must do to wipe out any security software that they may have included. I have seen new thumb-drives destroyed when mac users just threw all the encryption utilities away without following the manufacturers' recommendations.

Disk Utility in your applications > utilities folder can be used to partition a hard drive. Select your Seagate in the list of drives to work with. From the ERASE option... You must choose to reformat your new HD in MAC OS EXTENDED (journaled) format which will make the drive unusable with a MS machine without special drivers. When you reformat the drive, you can also choose to partition it. I made a 40 gigabyte partition on my Western Digital firewire drive which was plenty big enough to put my OS and all the freshly installed software on.

Reformatting the drive was surprisingly fast. Using super duper to clone a copy of my drive took a bit longer but was also fairly quick and easy.

REMEMBER ! If you are initializing any drive, then you will lose any files that are on that drive. It may seem like I'm repeating an obvious fact but it is a depressing feeling when you realize that you forgot to save the product key from a bit of software or erased that one picture of your old girlfriend/boyfriend that can never be replaced! Making a punch out list of procedural steps can never hurt and may save some regrettable mistake.

Now I can't claim any knowledge about Leopard, so I'm posting this back up in the forum so if anyone catches a mistake in what I said then I hope they feel free to correct me.

Cheers !