backing up an active system drive

[~ j ~]

helo there

im just getting my head round this cloning malarky. yet whenever i read manuals
or forums, i still get stuck on a certain thought, so forgive this dumb question ...

i have a g5, and an ibook.
do i run superdooper from the ibook to backup the g5s hard drive - and visaversa?

i guess what im saying is ive got in my head that my g5s operating system canot be backed up whilst active?
do i start it in firewire disk mode?

ouch my head hurts

[dnanian]

I'm not quite sure what you're trying to do, j. Are you trying to copy one to the other? Sync? One-time backup?

It's hard to give you advice without knowing... so, fill in some details about your intentions, and we'll go from there.

[~ j ~]

thanks for the reply ... i always get jumbled with the lingo, sorry!

i basically want a bootable copy, or clone (if thats how its called) of both computers hard drives.

my confusion comes from thinking this >
that in order to do this, the drive i am trying to copy must be 'inactive' ... ie: not booted up, or running any applications?
this is where i start to think - that i run superduper on a computer other than the one im trying to clone?

do i run superduper on the mac that i am actually trying to clone?

i have a g5 with 160G drive
and an ibook 30G drive
and i have just got a lacie 80G firewire drive to do the backing-up onto.

i hope to move all these backups over to a big 400G external drive,
if i ever work this out!

thanks!

[dnanian]

OK. You can definitely back up the drive you're booted from, j. Just connect the FireWire drive that you want to back up to, and follow the instructions in the User's Guide. Should be pretty easy!

[~ j ~]

ok thanks again

i knew i was making this hard for myself.
i'll give it a go tmoro.

x

[dnanian]

Sounds good! Let me know how it works out, OK?