"Ghosting" OS X

Hi AMartin,

SuperDuper! is one of the best ones out there. And cheap! Carbon Copy Cloner is free and also works well. The big advantage for you though with SuperDuper! is that it will create cloned data in a sparse .dmg file. So you can easily save multiple compressed drives on any hard drive. Just keep tabs on which clone belongs to which station to make a restore easy. No need to boot to another drive to create the clone. SuperDuper! can do a hot backup while booted to the drive you're cloning. Just do do anything else on that Mac while it's running.

Best option for you is probably use a really big external FireWire drive with two partitions. One just big enough to hold a minimal install of OS X with SuperDuper! and any other utilities you want on it. And the other partition to hold all of the .dmg files. Then when you need/want to restore a station, just take the external to that Mac, boot to the external and restore.

It's fair to say from the online demo I just watched, again, that 'Time Machine' is an announced product.

It is no more an announced product than Microsoft Office 2008 is an announced product. This is a gray area, and I wouldn't play hooky with the moderators
on something no one has their hands on except those with a non-disclosure agreement. To promise someone beyond the capabilities of what is listed on http://www.apple.com/macosx/ what is stated on Time Machine is to subject oneself to ridicule if it does not work that way. Let's keep an eye for it to actually get released in the hands of the general public before making presumptions about how it will work.

Message was edited by: a brody

+The big advantage for you though with SuperDuper! is that it will create cloned data in a sparse .dmg file.+


A brief point - so will CCC (see prefs, I think)

It also has the huge advantage of being Free ! (Donations welcomed...)


🙂

A brief point - so will CCC (see prefs, I think)

Right you are, Wayne. It couldn't do that before version 3 as I recall. I've had the registered version of SuperDuper! for a while, so hadn't taken another look at CCC until just now. The author of CCC has greatly changed and enhanced the application. Though I would still never give up SuperDuper! due to the registered version's Smart Update feature. 🙂 Since Andrew is essentially always going to create or restore complete images of their work station's drives, either will do. The free version of SuperDuper! will also create disk images.

Not to hijack your thread but does anybody know of a way to "ghost" an entire hard drive including a Boot Camp Windows Vista partition? I'm trying the Disk Utility method now but I'm not too confident in it. I tried Ghost 11 but the boot disc, while it looked like it was working, did not allow me to connect to the ghost server.
At any rate, if you're just backing up an OS X install I can vouch for Carbon Copy Cloner and he just updated it to be a Universal Binary! My friend swears by SuperDuper too but I haven't used it much to say for sure. I guess it's like the old Vi and eMacs debate huh? I've been using just Disk Utility lately though for some reason. Just highlight the install drive go to File>New>Disk Image From Disk0s5 select any options you might have like encryption and you're done. With that disk image you just point to it under the restore tab and that should be it.

Hi Danny,

I stopped using Disk Utility to create my clones for a couple of reasons. One, it can only do full drives or a selected folder. So each time you want to back up your drive, it takes forever since it will only do the whole works. A restore takes just as long. Worse though, is that for whatever reason, a lot of folks (including myself) found you couldn't restore your backups created with Disk Utility. It would give you some error message. I immediately looked for something else that was reliable.

I greatly prefer the registered version of SuperDuper! for the Smart Update feature. The initial clone of your drive takes a while since it has to copy everything. But once that's done, a Smart Update backup only updates what has changed to make the target match the source. So any later backups only take a couple of minutes. Great for just getting your main drive back to the way it was in short order. Also makes it easy to try all the shareware and freeware apps you want. No matter how badly they may wreck things, a restore only takes a few minutes once booted to a FireWire drive.

That's how I maintain things. An external drive with a minimal install of OS X and all of my utilities on it on one partition and a clone of my working internal drive on another.

Anyway, to answer your other question, WinClone works great for both backing up and restoring your bootcamp partition. It runs right from the OS X desktop. Creates a single image of the Windows partition to a Mac drive and restores from the same. And it's free!

Does "Ghost" work on an Intel Mac?

No, it's Windows only software. Not only won't it run under OS X, but even if you ran it from Parallels or a Boot Camp partition, it wouldn't be able to back up a Mac volume. That's why the OP is looking for something similar.

Does Ghost definitely not work on Intel-based Mac hardware though? I was able to boot to a Ghost CD but the Marvel Yukon NDIS driver I used was apparently not the correct one because I was not able to choose GhostCast as we usually do with PCs so that we can connect to the GhostCast Server. I had assumed that as long as I had the correct driver and could boot from the GhostCast CD I would be able to connect and upload something. Holding Option at boot allowed me to startup from the CD which made me hopeful but it reported errors prior to loading the ghostcast client and was not bound. What am I missing that would prevent this from working as long as the driver was correct? I checked Marvel's site and could only find one set of NDIS drivers but the version seemed much older than the one loaded under Vista.
I'll check into WinClone though for the time being since I need to deploy a MbP by the end of the week and can't spend anymore time with Ghost. A WinClone image along with an image of the OS X partition is better than nothing. Thanks!

Does Ghost definitely not work on Intel-based Mac hardware though?

Oh, you mean that way. I assumed you meant trying to use it within OS X somehow. Yes, that works. When I first used Boot Camp to put XP on my wife's Core Duo iMac, I could boot to my Drive Image CD (which Symantec bought out and made part of Ghost) on the iMac and backup to an external drive formatted as NTFS. And of course could also do a restore that way.

But it's a pain in the butt to do it that way when WinClone does such a nice job right from the OS X desktop. No need to futz with booting to the Ghost CD in order to create a backup or restore of the Windows partition.

Regardless of being able to start up to the Ghost CD, you still can't clone your Mac partition with it. Ghost has no clue how to handle an HFS+ volume.

I uploaded my Vista install using winclone but don't have the time to try restoring with the file. I'd love an all-in-one utility that could image an entire drive and restore to a fresh hard drive as it was without having to deal with partitions or whatever you have to do with winclone and CCC. I imagine you have to recreate the partition sizes manually using Disk Utility then try restoring the files back after that's done. I need to play around with it before I NEED to know how it works. Will Time Machine take care of all of this for us?!

Will Time Machine take care of all of this for us?!

Time Machine hasn't been released. Speculation is forbidden based on the Terms of Use on the right. Do you want one of us to risk our access to the board to answer your question, or were you not aware that your question poses severe consequences for anyone who tries to answer it truthfully?

No no no! that's what the ! after the ? meant. It was a "how great would it be if apple made this easy" exclamation point. I'm merely commenting that something like this should be made simple by Apple of all people and since they have a backup type app in the works (that's clearly on their os x leopard preview site) this would be the perfect thing to target. heavens ta betsy!

Message was edited by: Danny Sohayda

Since the file systems are different, I would ghost them separately onto separate disks, one of each file system. Note some virtualization environments have their own virtualized disk for Windows, which would get cloned over properly by a Mac cloning software. But for something that is in its own logical partition and not a separate file, I would ghost separately to a Windows only volume for the Windows portion, and clone on the Mac volume to a Mac formatted volume.

I would ghost separately to a Windows only volume for the Windows portion

Just to note, this isn't necessary with WinClone. It creates a compressed image of your Windows Boot Camp partition to a Mac volume and restores it from the same. In fact, I don't think it will even let you write the backup file to a Windows formatted volume.