backing up an active system drive

[~ j ~]

helo dnanian, thanks for all the help

backed up my ibook internal 30G drive to my external lacie 80G drive.
i booted up from the lacie 80G and all looks well. im using the clone as i type this - fantastic!

so - i have 4 drives i need to make backups of ... 2 of these 4 drives need to be bootable (my G5 system drive & my ibooks internal)

ok i have just a few other Q's

1* i guess i could PARTITION my 400G seagate firewire drive into say ... 4 partitions ... and make backups directly onto this drive?
this will prevent superduper from erasing the other backups whilst in the process of making one?

2* do i need the same free space on my destination drive, as is the entire size of the drive i am backing up?
or just enough for files on it to be backed up?

3* is there an advantage for me to use disk images?
4* will they save any space?
5* is a disk image directly bootable, if so, are they as reliable as the normal 'backup'?

i have read the manual several times, but some of it seems to be going in one ear and out the other!
i think ive read too many manuals lately!

x

[dnanian]

If you have multiple drives, I recommend creating multiple partitions, not using disk images. I list the reasons why in detail in the Guide, so take another look there.

You don't need the same free space, but the partition should be large enough to store the size you expect the data to get to, plus 10-20% slack.

[macfeller]

If I remember correctly, shouldn't a cloner be sure that Mail.app is not open when cloning? What about other apps?

[dnanian]

In general, no -- Mail can be backed up while open, but if mail is fetched while we're backing it up, you could have an incomplete backup.

It's all a matter of balancing convenience with "exact"... in most cases, if there's a problem, we'll generate an error. But, if you can, it never hurts to close everything... and you're obviously less likely to run into a problem that way.

[~ j ~]

oki

im backing up all 4 drives to my [now] partitioned big external firewire drive.

is it normal for the resulting backup drives icon to be not as the originals,
when backing up to a partition? ie: im just getting a generic firewire icon.

when i backed up a previous drive to a non partitioned drive, it copied the hard drives non standard icon too.

anyway, many thanks, this app is very easy to use, works fantasticly, and thus ... totally rocks

*also .. i have a 'dev' folder in the backup now - which wasnt in the original?

[dnanian]

Yes, that's normal. You get the icon of the source. A "generic" icon, on the source, gives you a "generic" icon on the destination -- if FireWire, a FireWire icon.

The "dev" folder is hidden by Finder when it's the boot drive, but not when copied. It's OK -- don't touch it!

Glad things are working well!

[~ j ~]

cheers