backing up to replace internal drive

[bastokyg]

First I wanted to say that from a UI designer's perspective, especially for something as complex and powerful as SuperDuper is, you did a really excellent job making this very usable, with a bare minimum of "scariness factor." Thanks!

I'm wondering if you can tell me if this backup scheme of mine will actually work:
I have a 450 MHz AGP Graphics G4 (with a processor upgrade to 750 MHz). It has a 20 GB master drive that has 2 partitions, one for OS X 10.4.2 and one for OS9.2, and a 60 GB slave drive that I use for apps and files.
1. I want to make a bootable backup of my 20 GB boot drive, to an external OWC Mercury Firewire hard drive that already has stuff on it that I don't want to delete (it does not have a backup of this 20 GB drive on it).
2. I want to replace the 20 GB drive with a much larger drive, boot from the Firewire bootable backup, and then "restore" the backup to the new internal drive.
This will keep me from having to reinstall OSX and OS 9.2. What do you think?

[dnanian]

bastokyg:

The problem is that while you could add a bootable backup to your OWC drive one time, you wouldn't be able to maintain it effectively if the partition combines data and backup (which isn't a great idea anyway).

You can store the backup in a sparse image or DMG, but then it's not directly bootable (though it retains its bootable properties). That will isolate it from the other files on the system.

Or -- preferably -- you can partition the OWC drive (even live, with data in place, using iPartition) to partition the drive into a backup and data partition, and you'd be able to boot from the backup partition (if the machine you're using supports that).

So -- once you resolve the above, the rest would be pretty easy. But another option would be to put the larger drive in the Firewire case, back up to it from the 20GB drive, test it, and then swap... basically, do what you're doing without the intermediate step.

[bastokyg]

Thanks for the excellent suggestions! I like the Firewire option the best.
I think I may have another solution though -- I've been wracking my brain on this for the past couple weeks:
1. Remove the boot drive from my G4, put it in my blue and white G3 so that I have an OS X bootable G3.
2. Put the new larger drive into the G4.
3. Boot the G3 (that now has the OS X bootable system)
4. Connect the G4 to the G3
5. Make a bootable backup via SuperDuper from the G3 to the G4
6. Now I have a G4 with a larger drive and the exact same system as I had previously.
7. Put the drive from the G3 (that originally came from the G4) into an OWC Firewire enclosure and use it for regular backups of my OS.

[dnanian]

It's worth a try, bastokyg. Just back it up *before* you move it to the G3, just in case, eh?