Send In The Clones!
In this day and age, it seems that there are new updates to operating systems and programs on a daily basis. I'm the type of editor who doesn't like to update my system every time there is a tiny little bug fix, as a small fix normally fixes what it is supposed to, and breaks something else that was working fine. I always tell editors that once they have their new systems, to install all the programs they need (including updates), update the OS and then archive the system. These days there are a lot of programs to do this job, but going back to one of my favorite phrases "Some of the best things in life are free", I think that every Mac user should have a copy of Carbon Copy Cloner. It is an excellent system backup utility, and it's FREE!
CCC works very simply. Once you have your drive (programs) ready for archive, simply launch CCC, select the Drive you want to clone (as you can see in the picture, we have selected the "Macintosh HD"), and then select the image or drive you want to archive to. In my opinion, everyone should buy a small external firewire HD (80 gigs) when they buy their system, as archiving to an image is a bit of a waste of time in my opinion, as the file size is still big, and if your drive dies and your image is on it, your image dies with it. Once you have archived your drive (a drive with 50 gigs of info takes about 1.5-2.5 hours to archive), you have a fully bootable drive. If your internal drive fails, you can install a new HD, boot from your "archive drive" and "unclone" all the information back to your new HD. Some other handy features of CCC are that you can select specific files you want to clone (not necessarily your entire drive), you can clone to a machine on your network and you can setup scheduled backups.
You might be thinking that this all seems pretty easy. Well, it is! The only thing to keep in mind is that if you are using a PowerPC (and have your system cloned) and you purchase a new Intel machine, do NOT unarchive your cloned image onto the new machine, as the Power PC's and Intel machines OS heirarchy are not compatible.
Head over to http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html , and download Carbon Copy Cloner for free. It's well worth it!
Posted at 09:59PM Apr 03, 2007 Read More... by Kevin P McAuliffe in General | Comments[0]
