OSX Leopard Bootable Time Machine “backups”

Well, I am a fan of OS X. Now with the recent 10.5.2 update it seems - again - rock solid as it was in the Tiger 10.4.9+ era.

I have bought Super Duper in the Tiger times because I needed a reliable, fast solution to backup my Macbook Pro. I was happy with that and it worked - the backup drive booted OK when I tried and I could access all my files - even the hard drive in the notebook too.

Then came Leopard last year September (2007) with its promise of having a cool built-in backup solution. Well it is one kind of a backup - as its name suggests it keeps snapshots of your data back in time. Mainly if you delete something and you have a timely time-machine backup it can provide you with that file. It is similar to the Previous Versions feature included in Windows 2003 server and above (Vista too?).

Now my favorite Super Duper stopped working when Leopard came out (their new 2.5 version out in February, 2008 works now!) - and as it was the only app I knew being capable of creating a bootable drive (I was not aware of the bless command and the BootX file back then) I needed to look for an other way around this.

The solution was Carbon Copy Cloner which is a free app and provides very similar features (yes, including the bootable drive too) to that of Super Duper. It also worked fine with Leopard back in December, 2007. Which I needed back then because I swapped my 120G hard drive to a 250G one. I have no idea what would happened without that nice piece of app so thanks again, Mike Bombich.

It seems to me now that if you really depend on your computer being available for you at any given time, then you need to have:

1. at least a bootable clone of your whole system drive (do this at least!)
2. a time-machine based backup of - again - your whole system drive (sometimes even you can delete a file which you’ll regret soon…)

Having the first option satisfied is fine for most professionals. And by professional, in this case, I mean people who absolutely think twice whether to delete that certain file or directory. And when you empty the Trash, be sure you do not need what’s inside anymore. It happened to me once, and only a few hours’ worth of my work had been flushed down the toilet. Bringing back files from an OS X HFS volume is a nightmare. And believe me, I have tried several apps (Data Rescue, etc. - I have not yet tried the new FileSalvage though) The main reason being the filenames becoming unresolvable after a delete. You do not want to go through the same.

So, having a bootable drive is easy to achieve by using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner. Once you do that, next time you plug your external backup drive into your Mac, rebooting while holding down the option key you will find yourself in your beloved OS X again from the backup drive. Save what you can from the bad (if it’s bad) hard drive and thank yourself for being so humble and clever that you made a backup.

If you often find yourself accidentally deleting files that you later need again then your best bet is Time Machine. Unfortunately Time Machine does not make a bootable backup drive, and in case you cannot boot from your computer you need to have a Leopard install DVD at hand (and booting from that holding Option + C) and using the Time machine Restore feature from that.

Again, the new Macbook Air does not even have a dvd drive…

You might be traveling around and do not happen to carry a Leopard install dvd with you when the dire need arises.

What can you do…?

Well you can just create a bootable Time Machine backup drive. My best bet is to use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a copy of your Leopard Install DVD or your system drive (with only the necessary data kept) and use that also for Time Machine

So:

1. get yourself an external hard drive at least the same size (I suggest having at least one with double the space) as your system drive. Format it as HFS (journaled), and while empty, you can tell OS X not to index it (because you use it for backup)
2. using Carbon Copy Cloner make a copy of your Leopard install DVD like this:
   
   
   
   If you use your system drive as a clone source then it’s better to skip the directories with huge files (mp3 collection, movies, downloads…)
3. set up time machine to use this newly prepared drive for backups. You’re done!

Now you can test boot into your fresh clone by holding the option key during OS X startup.

Have fun! And enjoy your newly found safety.

p.s. If you’re a bit like me and keep gigs of music and video (plus some downloaded software) on your machine which you do not mind losing - maybe because you already have them backed up to a dvd or to an other external drive or you know where to get them from the net etc. - then you should set up Time Machine in a way that it does not back up those directories. This is all to keep your most important data safe (like your documents and other work files) and not all the ’shit’ you keep floating around on your system, and also to let the backup run fast.

So pop up your Time Machine preferences and click on Options…:

Then add the directories you do not want to be backed up:

Done!