2 Comments

Become a Time Machine Power User with Bootable Backups

June 17, 2008 by in Random with 2 Comments

I love Time Machine and the Time Capsule. It is a brainless method to make sure your data is backed up. My only problem with Time Machine is that is doesn’t image your hard drive, it just backs up select files.

Using the disk utility to partition your primary drive you can make your Time Machine backup a perfect bootable emergency partition.

Using Disk Utility, create a partition on the drive you are using for Time Machine (see Disk Utility Help for instructions on how to do this without erasing your Time Machine backups). The new partition must be large enough to hold the contents of your computer’s drive, plus 10 or 20Gb of elbow room. If your system weighs 85Gb, then the new partition should be 100Gb or so. Leave this partition blank, and go on with your life.

Now, when (not if!) your Mac’s drive fails, do the following. Make sure your Time Machine drive is plugged in and powered on, then insert your Mac OS X Install disc and restart your Mac. In the installer, choose Utilities » Restore System from Backup. Click Continue in the resulting dialog, then select your Time Machine volume. Choose the Time Machine backup that you want to restore (probably the most recent).

Then, when you are prompted for a destination volume, choose the empty partition you created on your Time Machine drive. Time Machine will create a bootable duplicate of your system, which you can use until you replace your faulty main drive. When your Mac is healthy again, you can reinstall your system from the backup drive using either Time Machine, or Migration Assistant (from the new bootable volume you created).

A really great tip for the ultra paranoid out there, because as you know hard drives fail and you only realize that when your machine doesn’t boot anymore.

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  • Doc

    Yet another great tip Dan, keep up the good work!

  • not-convinced

    Nice thoughts to get around of an apparently OR bad TM architecture *1) OR TM designed like that by purpose *2).

    *1)
    A real-live backup of a production or ‘homemade’ system only is of real-live use if you can be ‘back’ (restore) straight away without headache and additional costly professional skills. In this spirit in my opinion TM architecture has a big defect because the TM HD is NOT bootable (and other ‘minors’ not subject of this post) .

    *2)
    As I don’t think that TM architects didn’t think about that (see *1)) I have to ”accept” that TM is designed as IS. Means obviously marketing and other economic interests moved Apple to include a backup tool into Leopard which in other platforms would not be accepeted as to mean business “backup” systems. That’s a pity and if you like or dis-like window-dressing. How to make an obvious reliable, fast and non-HD-costly and secure backup tool is NOT a secret or matter of science or technical enigma: it’s a matter of or doing it or having other tendency. Point.

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