[StevenHF]

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