problems restoring from image

[lpn]

New Mac user here. My setup: powerbook with several partitions (partition1: system, partition2: users, partition3: data etc.) and external firewire drive, with 2 partitions. There is only one user with home directory /Volumes/partition2/user.

Creating bootable copy of the system partition to the first partition of the firewire drive and restoring from it works fine. Creating an image of the "users" partition to the second partition of the second drive works fine. The problem is restoring from that image, SuperDuper gives an error that the target partition is busy. It makes sense because this is where the user partition is.

Obvious solution is to have the user home directories on the first partition (but that would increase the sizes of the backup images).

I tried to change the home directory, so that the second partition is not in use, for some reason this doesn't work, even after rebooting the system.

Another thing that I could do is to create a separate user with home directory in the first partition, login using this user and restore the home directory of the first user.

Any ideas for simpler solution?

[dnanian]

Hm. You've kind of already complicated things a bit by separating out the two partitions: any particular reason you've done that?

(Personally, I wouldn't isolate user data or data on their own partitions, because it's quite easy to "drop in" a new OS with existing user data -- unlike how it is in Windows...)

[lpn]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Hm. You've kind of already complicated things a bit by separating out the two partitions: any particular reason you've done that?

(Personally, I wouldn't isolate user data or data on their own partitions, because it's quite easy to "drop in" a new OS with existing user data -- unlike how it is in Windows...)

If anything happens, I need to be able to recover the system as fast as possible, thus I need a bootable copy of the system partition (as opposed to reinstalling it again or upgrading to a new version). The user home directories will be large (a lot of scientific data). If the home directories are in the main partition, even one bootable copy of the system partition will be very large and I need to keep several of them.

[dnanian]

OK. Well, I guess what I'd probably try, in the event of this kind of disaster, is to restore using your OSX boot disk and Disk Utility. See section 5 of the User's Guide -- just follow something like the disaster recovery (but for user files), if you're trying to restore the whole thing at once.

I'd still consider some consolidation, but you know how you want to work better than I do, so if this is the optimal setup for you, go for it...

[lpn]

Originally Posted by dnanian

OK. Well, I guess what I'd probably try, in the event of this kind of disaster, is to restore using your OSX boot disk and Disk Utility. See section 5 of the User's Guide -- just follow something like the disaster recovery (but for user files), if you're trying to restore the whole thing at once.

I'd still consider some consolidation, but you know how you want to work better than I do, so if this is the optimal setup for you, go for it...

That worked
Thanks a lot!

[dnanian]

My pleasure: happy to help!