Saturday, April 05, 2008

Backing up the New Mac Book Pro

I have a windows partition on my new mac book pro and I think about backing everything up so that I will have a quick restore plan if anything happens to the hard drive. Time machine is nice if I want to retrieve files, but it is not so convenient if there is a hard drive failure. I will have to reinstall the OS on a new drive before I even do a restore.

So this is what I am doing. I bought a 250 gig hard drive in a firewire casing. I use winclone from Two Canoes to make an image of my windows drive. The image is compressed and only takes about 4 gigs. I put this windows drive image and put it onto my Mac desktop. Next, I used carbon copy to clone my Mac Drive to the 250 gig hard drive. The 250 gig hard drive is bootable. I am actually writing this entry with the OS being run from the firewire drive. You use boot camp to choose the fire wire drive as the boot drive.

If the hard drive fails, I will install a new hard drive, use carbon copy to reinstate my Mac OS, and then use winclone to reinstate my windows partition.

Both Winclone and Carbon Copy Cloner are donation ware. You decided what to donate. You don't even have to donate if you don't want to. I donated US$10 per program.

I will still use Time Machine for file backup.

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