pre-Firewire Macs
 

I would appreciate any advise on backup and restoring pre-Firewire iMacs. It is so easy to make bootable backup clones using a Firewire external drive, but how did classic Mac users do it in the old days?

In two of the old iMacs I'm setting up, there is no firewire. I have read that SuperDuper can make a sparseimage clone over a network. The manual also says that it can be restored by booting from the OS X install disk and using Disk Utility's restore options to restore the Mac from the sparseimage clone. However, I don't know whether this would work if I saved the clone on a USB 2.0 hard drive or on a d2 DVD with an external DVD reader (neither of which I have right now) on these old Macs. I upped the RAM and run Panther on the Bondi Blue & Tiger on the faster one. On the Bondi Blue the internal HD is partitioned into 8 GB & 32 GB. Perhaps I could also partition the other iMac's hard drive and save a sparseimage clone on the second partiton, but this would take up a lot of internal memory and if the hard drive itself fails or is corrupted then I have no backup.

Please let me know what you suggest. Thanks.
Steve

Saving the clone on a USB hard drive ought to work, I think. You won't be able to boot from it (and it will be very slow to create, as those iMacs only have USB1.1 ports) but should function OK. The part I'm not sure of is whether you will be able to see the USB drive while booted from the OS X install disk so you might want to borrow a USB drive first in order to test this out. If you can see a flash memory drive then I think a hard drive will also work OK.

In answer to your initial question, most users of pre-Firewire Macs used SCSI drives! The first generation iMacs were a bit of an anomaly in having neither SCSI nor Firewire...