Mac Disk Utility
May. 24th, 2006 09:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
asterrocI'm trying to use Disk Utility to make a disk image of the whole computer on my brand spanking new external HD for backup purposes. However, when I click "New Disk Image" or any version of that thru the File Menu, it says (roughly) "Unable to create image of ****. Resource in use." This sounds to me like it won't do an image of the same disk that Disk Utility is hosted on. So how the fuck do I backup my whole computer?
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Carbon Copy Cloner!
Date: 2006-05-24 11:24 pm (UTC)A couple of tips from someone who treats his data as if it were his brain:
*The utility won't launch if your backup drive isn't plugged in. This makes sense, 'cuz where are you gonna copy your data if there's no 2nd drive or partition, right? Instead it'll give you an error message that'll tell you exactly what I just said.
* Under "Preferences", I suggest letting it repair permissions before cloning, having it make the target disk bootable (that way you can boot off of it afterwards and absolutely verify that the backup worked!), and check both Synchronization options. That last bit will require that you download an extra bit of free software, and is pretty much optional. It'll just make subsequent backups faster than having it wipe the target drive before backing up.
* If you boot off of your backup afterwards to test it, you should find that everything behaves exactly the same as if you were running off of the internal drive, with one exception. For some reason it doesn't maintain the arrangement of icons on your desktop. Just FYI.
I really can't rave enough about CCC. It's the single most valuable piece of 3rd-party software you can have for your Mac, and I've never heard a bad word about it from anyone. If you have any problems or questions feel free to either reply to this comment or shoot an e-mail message to my LJ user name @ gmail.com.
Oh, one other thing. If your backup drive is larger than your Mac's HD, you may want to partition the backup drive (using Disk Utility) into two partitions beforehand. Make one partition that's the same size as your Mac's HD for backups, and have the other one take the rest of the drive for data storage or whatever.
Good luck!
Re: Carbon Copy Cloner!
Date: 2006-05-24 11:45 pm (UTC)1. What would I do to then move the CCC thing back onto a HD, if that HD has been restored to factory settings?
2. I can't find the command to partition in Disk Utility, and the help file doesn't give anything back when I typed in "partition".
3. And I presume partitioning will wipe anything currently on that disk?
(Our three main weapons are fear, surprise, ...)
Re: Carbon Copy Cloner!
Date: 2006-05-25 11:55 am (UTC)2. I'm guessing the tabs along the top of your Disk Utility are First Aid, Erase, RAID, and Restore? Plug the external drive in and select it in the left pane, and a Partition tab will appear as well. It won't let you partition the drive that you're currently running from because...
3. ...yes, it'll wipe anything currently on the disk you partition. Unfortunately, Disk Utility's partitioning capability has a couple of limitations, and the big one is that any changes it makes to the partition table wipe the drive. So let's say that I've got a drive with two partitions, A and B, and I want to split up partition B into two partitions (so that I've got A, B, and C). If I use Disk Utility for this then I'll lose any data on partition A as well, which boggles my mind and fills my heart with sadness. ;-)
There are third party utilities out there that can non-destructively resize and repartition Mac disks (like Partition Magic on the PC side). I don't know of any that are free, but if sparing the pre-existing data is critical then you shouldn't have too much trouble finding an app that'll let you do so. Google is your friend, and you may want to search through macosxhints.com as well.
Re: Carbon Copy Cloner!
Date: 2006-05-25 01:08 pm (UTC)Yeah, I know, but it won't tell me whether the program comes with spyware. :-P Perhaps macosxhints.com will. I'll give your recommendations a try this weekend, nice long weekend. :) Thanks!