| Hey, the Macintosh bloggers rock more than the Linux bloggers |
Hmmm, within 13.4 seconds of asking a half arsed question about Macintosh backups, I've got seven fully arsed answers (I mean that in a good way). Thanks everyone for your help.
I have more questions though, mainly because I hadn't thought through the Macintosh backup options enough. What I want from the backup is an ISO image of a DVD which I can use to restore the machine if the disk dies. I will then do regular rsyncs of the data from the machine to the network, and use those to restore after using the DVD image to re-image.
I need an ISO image though, because the Macintosh doesn't have a DVD burner. So, questions:
Can Carbon Copy Cloner create ISO images instead of burning a DVD? If I rsync restore to a newly imaged machine, which bits are "the OS" and shouldn't be rsynced (or is it all safe?). Is a one off boot DVD enough, or should I do it every few months or something? Can cdrecord on Linux create a bootable Macintosh DVD?
Further advice gratefully accepted.
posted at: 11:28 | path: /macintosh/osx | permanent link to this entry
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#1
Stephen Still
In order of importance, you should back up:
/Users
/Applications (but only for convenience's sake: there shouldn't be user data in there)
/Library
Everything else is part of the OS and will be restored on reinstall. Personally, I just back up /Users — it contains basically everything a normal user would want to save. It's so painless to reinstall the OS that I wouldn't bother backing it up.
Oh, and I'm pretty sure that cdrecord should be able to create a bootable Mac DVD, given a dmg/iso with a blessed file system on it.
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#2
benley
So, if you go the CCC route, you will want to check "Scan the image for ASR" (or however that's actually phrased). Store it someplace accessible via http on your network, and if you need to restore you can boot a regular OSX install disc, run Disk Utility, and from there one of the things you can do is restore a disk image onto your hard drive.
(ASR is Apple System Restore. It's been around since the olden days. There is a commandline version.)
If you want to be more automated, try using NetRestore - it's another mike bombich thing. It's a wrapper around ASR that's designed to be run from a netboot or CD-booted environment. It comes with this NetRestore Helper doodad that I used to use to make netboot images which ran netrestore and imaged macs in a hurry.