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Backing Up Your Data; The Where, Why, and How

March 20th, 2009

Apple / Mac, Miscellaneous, MS / Windows, The Internet

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About Thomas

Thomas is a self-proclaimed guru (just ask him). He enjoys long walks on the beach, running Mac OS X on his Inspiron 1525, and tweeting about nonsensical life happenings. You can follow Thomas on twitter, email him, or search the interwebs for all his personal information. Neither should be too difficult.

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25 Responses to “Backing Up Your Data; The Where, Why, and How”

  1. redhawk
    August 15th, 2009 at 9:52 PM

    I used CCC to clone the primary/main hard drive in a Mac pro desktop onto a spare drive. After the cloning finished, I booted my Mac from that spare drive and everything worked fine without doing anything else. Did the same thing on my Hackintosh computer, I just got a black blank screen when it boots from the cloned drive. Does anyone know as to why ?

    • Thomas
      August 15th, 2009 at 9:55 PM

      When making hackintosh system backups, as indicated in the guide, you need to install a Bootloader such as Chameleon onto it in order to boot the backup.

  2. Thomas
    April 26th, 2009 at 9:53 AM

    Ok glad to hear that’s working for you. If you have anything else that’s not working for you please let us know in the problems respective post (https://dailyblogged.com/post/your-audio-doesnt-work-right-well/ if it doesn’t have one)

  3. Jacob
    April 26th, 2009 at 1:40 AM

    Yeah it worked a treat.
    Stoked that I have a fully fully functional hackbook :D

  4. Thomas
    April 25th, 2009 at 7:25 AM

    Instead of asking you about the panic, when it happens, booting with -f, and all that other crap, since its a backup drive I would suggest that you just re-clone your HDD onto the external drive again and see how it goes because its possible that something didn’t copy properly.

  5. Jacob
    April 25th, 2009 at 6:32 AM

    Ok, so I got the xXx 10.5.6 fully functional all software up to date, everything working orgasmically, just 1 problem.
    I used ccc, installed chameleon to the external hd but when i try to boot from it i get a panic. The external hd is partitioned in 2 parts, one formated in fat so i can use it with windows machines still if i so need to, the other (where the clone is stored) in mac extended journalled.

    Any ideas?

  6. Thomas
    April 18th, 2009 at 6:38 PM

    When doing a full system restore with Time Machine, you must overwrite all of the data. CCC takes much less time and allows you to work while its restoring because you are booted onto another copy from the OS. I can’t really speak for Time Machine too much as I have never used it on a hackintosh although I know for a fact it takes longer. It is still a viable option, just not the best one.

  7. steve0suprem0
    April 18th, 2009 at 6:32 PM

    alright, i downloaded ccc. but now that i’m reading about time machine, it seems sufficient. what’s so inconvenient about doing a full system restore with it? like all things apple, it seems pretty straight forward.

  8. Thomas
    April 18th, 2009 at 4:20 PM

    The reason I don’t like Time Machine (on hackintoshes) is that it is extremely inconvenient to so a full system restore. If you use either SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner, all you have to do is boot from the recovery partition. Then you launch either SuperDuper or CCC and set it to restore onto the partition that is no longer working like it should. And all while you are running all your applications and browsing the Web like nothing ever happened. Plus, if only a couple of files are corrupt or causing the issue, only those files will be replaced, thus making the recovery process take less than 5 minutes. Don’t get me wrong, I think Time Machine is really useful. I even use it on my Mom’s real Mac. I just think that the other options are more convenient.

  9. steve0suprem0
    April 18th, 2009 at 4:03 PM

    could you explain your distaste for time machine? i’m of the mind that if there’s a solution imbedded into the os, and it works, why bother putting a 3rd party program on there, even if it has pretty shiny features.

    case in point: i use internet explorer. in windows of course. i know it’s not the best, but it’s there and it works well enough that i really don’t see the point in the redundancy of firefox, despite its being a much better application.

  10. Thomas
    March 21st, 2009 at 6:17 AM

    If you would like to make a complete system backup that will be bootable then the option that is for you is the External Hard Drive backup with one of the two listed programs.

  11. ffreese
    March 21st, 2009 at 3:52 AM

    So what backup solution is for backing up a whole partition an restore from external drive?

  12. Thomas
    March 20th, 2009 at 7:06 PM

    Haha well I sometimes have to restore up to a couple times a month so it would be unfeasible for me but if it works for you then by all means, do as you please.

  13. Alex
    March 20th, 2009 at 6:58 PM

    Yep.

  14. Thomas
    March 20th, 2009 at 6:11 PM

    So Alex, you would rather reinstall the entire OS and drivers than just make a complete backup?

  15. Alex
    March 20th, 2009 at 5:45 PM

    I use a 160GB external drive but I only back up important documents and such. I’ve done so many reinstalls of Linux/OSX that configuring a new system is just fun for me, and I learn something new every time.

  16. Thomas
    March 20th, 2009 at 5:23 PM

    Osmac see the pic just posted :-) And no, the only online backup I use is adrive.com because it is 100% free. No trial shit, its all free.

  17. Osmac
    March 20th, 2009 at 5:19 PM

    Was wondering what your thought on TimeMachine are. The specs look incredible, but I have not seen it at work yet.

    Any experience with Carbonite which is supposed to be released for Mac recently.

  18. Richard
    March 20th, 2009 at 5:02 PM

    Speaking of this article, I really need to back up. I use Carbon Copy Cloner and swear by it.

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