Bulletproof Leopard Backup
Posted 6 months, 1 week ago at 3:58 am. 5 comments
Like most mac geeks I spent my Friday evening installing Apple’s newest release in their OS X series, Leopard. I ordered Leopard and a 320GB backup drive a week before the release date to make sure everything arrived by Friday. I had planned from the beginning to do a 100% clean install because for one, my Tiger install was getting a little dirty, and I prefer the clean slate approach. Plus, I wanted to avoid all of the strange upgrade shenanigans going on all over the place. My broseph Jason suggested that I make an image of my drive, and I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that on my own.
Creating an image would give me a 100% bulletproof backup of my system. Once you have the image, it’s literally an exact image of your system. If something was to go wrong during the Leopard install, I would simply have to restore the image to my Macintosh HD and reboot. If Leopard successfully installs, it’s a simple double click of the image file to mount it as if it were an external drive to drag your files into Leopard. Creating an image of your drive is truly the best way to backup your system, it kills an entire flock of birds with one stone.
It’s really easy to create an image of your drive. Simply boot into the Leopard (or Tiger, both work but I had the Leopard CD right in hand obviously) installer and launch Disk Utility from the menu-bar. Make sure to connect your external drive prior to booting into Leopard’s installer, I am not sure if it’s intelligent enough to detect drives being plugged in after the installer has initialized. I don’t have the camera on hand I used during my Leopard install, but the Disk Utility included with OS X is exactly the same so my screenshots below are from inside Leopard.
Once you’re into the Disk Utility, select your Mac’s local hard drive and click on the “+ New Image” button in the upper toolbar. I dialog will pop up asking where you would like to place the image (This is where you select your external drive), whether or not you would like compression, as well as the option for encryption. I have a 120GB drive in my Macbook which was approximately 80% full and using compression without encryption everything was compressed 47% leaving me with a nicely sized 59GB .DMG file.
Once this is complete you can boot into Tiger and check the DMG just in case, but I tend to not always take the best safety precautions, and I simply went on with the installer. Once Leopard installed (which went 100% smooth and clean) I mounted my DMG and began copying files back into my system. It was a total piece of cake. I had every single file from my Tiger install (Including my /usr/ directory with all my Apache configuration files!), without a single install problem. Plus, if I ever wanted to restore my Tiger installation (which I contemplated many times when dealing with mod_python) it would be extremely simple. I can even boot directly into my Tiger install right off of my external drive if I wanted to. The drive imaging method is certainly a quick, easy, and bulletproof backup method for those of you moving to Leopard.
Next time I’ll go into gory detail on my intimate Saturday evening with Leopard and getting Django installed! Leopard does not play nice with mod_python at all.
Thank you by the way for going out of your way and explaining this.
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Michael,
This is all fine and dandy with the onslaught of windows and mouse to the arena of the “hacker” — man 1 dd
dd if=target of=targer bs=4092
would do the same thing, regardless of what you have on it (eg, multiple partitions, windows partitions, linux partitions, etc).
I never knew one could do it manually! That is good to know.
I have beennusing Carbon Copy Cloner for a while to keep regular backups of my entire system. I rescently started to use SuperDuper to clone because it has incrimental cloning and scheduled backups.
I would highly recomend either of those for backup solutions.
Oh man, you *really* don’t need mod_python to develop Django. Just use it’s built-in server for testing, ala: ./manage.py runserver
And it’s up on localhost:8000
mod_python is for deployment only, however, I recommend you look into mod_wsgi instead.