Back Up, Restore on MacBook using SuperDuper!

Filed under: mac - 15 Jan 2007 23:35

Today, I finally got my Christmas present: 160gb internal drive for my MacBook and an external 250gb USB2/FireWire drive. The idea: I can do regular backups with a program called SuperDuper! and, in case something goes wrong, do a partial or complete restore.

I figured a good way to test this functionality was to backup the existing 60gb drive to the external drive, slap the new hard drive in, and do a restore. Since I backed up to an image file on the external drive–I did this so I could use the drive for other things too–the only way to restore was to boot off the Mac OSX Install DVDs and do the restore from there. The SuperDuper! manual explained exactly how to do this–go into the Disk Utility, click on Restore, mount the disk image file, drag some stuff around and off it goes! Nice in theory, but for some reason, the Disk Utility program does not allow me to drag anything on the screen!

A little Googling, and I discovered this was a fairly common problem that didn’t happen all the time. In my case, I ended up having to switch to a Terminal session and using the asr utility. Certainly not my favorite approach, but it eventually worked, and now my MacBook is living large–hard drive, that is.

Now off to load BootCamp. Yes, I have Parallels, but I want the option to boot completely into XP if I need to. Also, the latest beta of Parallels supports using a BootCamp partition, which is oh-so-much better than the alternative.

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4 Comments

Pingback by VoIP, Web 2.0 and a lot of Tech News » LucaFiligheddu.com

at least) but it seems faster. Now I can’t load it anymore, I’ll try to reboot (yes, once or twice a month you shoudl reboot your Mac.. - SuperDuper: it’s intended for a complete backup of your HDD. I don’t think you can use it for daily backup… Phoneboy ? - Sync: it seems the best in terms of functionalities. Not free. According to the first shot, it seems very fast. Any recommendation ? Stay tuned for further details soon. Technorati Tags: ibackup
Pingback by VoIP, Web 2.0 and a lot of Tech News » LucaFiligheddu.com

at least) but it seems faster. Now I can’t load it anymore, I’ll try to reboot (yes, once or twice a month you shoudl reboot your Mac.. - SuperDuper: it’s intended for a complete backup of your HDD. I don’t think you can use it for daily backup… Phoneboy ? - Sync: it seems the best in terms of functionalities. Not free. According to the first shot, it seems very fast. Any recommendation ? Stay tuned for further details soon. Technorati Tags: ibackup
Pingback by The PhoneBoy Blog

the Ubuntu path, which was a nice diversion, but the lack of WPA support on PPC made it pretty useless to me. Recently, I had decided to try this again. One thing I had now that I didn’t before was anexternal FireWire drive. And while I tried to load the OS from the iBook onto the FireWire drive, that didn’t work so well. However, I also have an old Power PC-based Mac Mini I got a couple of years back, which I ended up using to load Mac OS onto the FireWire drive.
Comment by jjdebone

Hello, I just purchased a 160gig Seagate hard drive for my macbook (60gig). I have a WD external drive on which I would like to backup everything and then be able to transfer the contents of my current HD onto my Seagate. Could someone please explain the most most efficient, intelligent way of doing this, as I only know how to physically replace the HD…

Thanks,
jjdebone