The Best Way To Back Up Your Mac With Hard Drives

iggy pence said:

You can always drag and drop ‘files’ from your Mac to a hard drive, but you can’t just drag and drop a whole Mac hard drive for a back up. First, it takes forever to copy, whereas the back up utilities are faster and more precise with permissions. Second, for the cloned hard drive to be bootable, the files have to be ‘blessed’ by the utility, something which does not happen with a drag and drop copy.

Bregalad said:

While MTBF numbers are interesting, you really never know when your hard drive is going to kick the bucket. I’ve had 3 die of “old age” and one that was dead on arrival from the store. Even the “old age” ones weren’t necessarily old. The 30GB drive from my first G4 only lasted 2 years.

To protect myself I replace my internal hard drive every year and keep the old one untouched for at least a month in case I need to go back to it or retrieve a file I originally thought unnecessary to migrate. This is a really easy and inexpensive strategy if you’ve got a tower, but is annoying and/or expensive if you have something like an iMac that buries its hard drive behind the LCD panel. It’s one of the reasons why I still haven’t been lured into getting an iMac. Relatively poor performance for the money and having to throw away a perfectly good screen when I upgrade are the other two reasons.

Oddly enough for someone who still has a hard drive with a bootable copy of 10.3.9 despite having no hardware that can run it, I do not use Time Machine. Initially it was because the web contained too many horror stories about TM backups failing and people unable to restore from them. I’m sure those bugs are gone now, but my setup is actually too complicated for a single TM volume. In addition to my boot volume I have a second partition with permissions disabled. Those two can’t be backed up to the same volume. Why disable permissions? A few years back I used to do all the imports from my camera to iPhoto. The iPhoto library was in Users/shared so everyone could access it, but when my wife tried to edit photos she was regularly presented with error messages suggesting she didn’t have permission. After hours of research and futzing with permissions I gave up and moved the library to a new volume with all permissions turned off. That bug is probably fixed now too, but I’ve gotten used to having separate volumes for different types of data.

I have a weekly schedule for Carbon Copy Cloner to back up both the boot volume and media volume. I also keep a copy of our family photos and videos on a portable drive at work.

I actually found a use for my old 10.3.9 boot drive a while ago. I have an old copy of Adobe Creative Suite installed. I’m just a home user and don’t even know how to use most of it so buying a newer version would be a waste of money. Anyway, I was trying to make the “open in external editor” feature work in iPhoto so I could adjust colors and levels, but all it would do is launch Photoshop and just sit there. After much googling I discovered that CS relies on a file that it installs in an obscure folder to pass launch/open parameters, a file that is NOT copied when you use the Migration Manager to move your system to a new hard drive or new computer, something I’ve done at least 5 times since installing CS. I couldn’t re-install Creative Suite because the installer doesn’t run in Leopard. The only way to get that file was to go back to the volume where it was originally installed and copy the necessary folder.