Backing up the hard drive q?

[OldCorpse]

Through a bit of idiocy, I lost the original discs to some of my applications. As a result those apps only live on my iBook HDD. Should that HDD for any reason collapse, I'll be sol ... so, I decided that I need to back up my HDD just in case something goes wrong.

So, I'll use Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) to back up my 40GB iBook HDD to an external 300GB Seagate with firewire.

In the CCC documentation, it says: "Mounted disk image. Cloning to a disk image will (obviously), not yield a bootable volume unless you use CCC to restore the image to a physical partition or disk."

There are two options in CCC: I can clone my iBook HDD to 1) Disc Image or 2)Bootable Drive.

I'm a bit unclear here. Which should I select, if my main aim is to make shure that if my iBook HDD bites the dust, I still have my apps available? And by "available" I mean that I'll be able to take the backup from the external Seagate and put it on a new notebook drive that I can pop into my iBook, and all the apps will work as they do now on my original HDD.

Thanks!

 

[robbieduncan]

If you want to be able to simply drop the backup on drive and keep going in the case of disaster you should be making a bootable clone. Then if the worst happens you put a new drive in the iBook, boot from the clone and clone that back to the iBook.

 

[OldCorpse]

Sounds good. That's what I'll do. Thanks!

And btw. what other backup utilities do folks recommend, specifically for making bootable clones?

 

[robbieduncan]

I personally use and like SuperDuper. Whilst it costs money for the good features once you have paid it only copies the files that have changed, not all the files which is a big time saver.

 

[bokdol]

Through a bit of idiocy, I lost the original discs to some of my applications. As a result those apps only live on my iBook HDD. Should that HDD for any reason collapse, I'll be sol ... so, I decided that I need to back up my HDD just in case something goes wrong.

So, I'll use Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) to back up my 40GB iBook HDD to an external 300GB Seagate with firewire.

In the CCC documentation, it says: "Mounted disk image. Cloning to a disk image will (obviously), not yield a bootable volume unless you use CCC to restore the image to a physical partition or disk."

There are two options in CCC: I can clone my iBook HDD to 1) Disc Image or 2)Bootable Drive.

I'm a bit unclear here. Which should I select, if my main aim is to make shure that if my iBook HDD bites the dust, I still have my apps available? And by "available" I mean that I'll be able to take the backup from the external Seagate and put it on a new notebook drive that I can pop into my iBook, and all the apps will work as they do now on my original HDD.

Thanks!

the probelm with a disk image is that you would need a lot of space. including the space to open the disk image to actually use it.(i dont know exactly how much more it needs to open maybe it's not a big deal) your best option is to have an relieable external drive to back up your hdd. espacially if your computer bites the dust as ibook hdd tends to do. what is nice about the external firewire drive is that if the internal is down you can boot right off the external (firewire) and with minimal data loss be up and running. as any new data made after the back up wont be on.