"Ghosting" OS X

If the purpose of ghosting is backing up, I would NOT use compression. Compression is much more likely to corrupt data than other things that can affect the data. I've had numerous backups become unusable due to compression.

Well, I've never had a backup corrupted due to compression. Following your "rules", Andrew would instead have to break up his external drive for backing up his Mac stations into as many partitions as he has Macs. Not to mention needing a much bigger drive to handle all of that uncompressed information. Using compression would allow him to use ONE partition to hold all of his Mac's images.

To each their own.

First, SuperDuper! is an incredible tool. When used with the correct hardware it works amazingly well. I use the term correct hardware as many people are surprised when they can't boot their PPC machine from their backup stored on a USB drive (which will work on in Intel machine). PPC machines will only boot off a FireWire drive.

Second, nobody is getting booted for commenting on what 'Time Machine' may or may not do. The Terms of Use specifically states as verboten:

1. Speculations or rumors about unannounced products.

It's fair to say from the online demo I just watched, again, that 'Time Machine' is an announced product. While it's true that it's specific functionality won't be known to the public (for one can get in trouble for violating an NDA) until 'Leopard' is released, it appears that Apple's intent is for 'Time Machine' to be less of a recovery tool from catastrophic failure (or just wanting to move to a larger drive) and more of a tool for "Darn, where'd my Keynote presentation go?" situations.

I think 'Time Machine' will be quite useful, especially to the casual user. However, if you're looking for something in the 'OS X' world that does what 'Ghost' does, I've found 'SuperDuper!' lives up to it's rather corny name. It helps that the author, David Nanian, provides great support. Pay him even if you don't think you'll use the Advanced Options.

Cheers

Hi Danny,

There's a bit on Time Machine here. But until Leopard is released, there really isn't anything else to read up on.

I would also like to recommend Carbon Copy Cloner available from Bombich.com

Disk Utility will also handle this. See the Restore tab.

bd

Does "Ghost" work on an Intel Mac? Could you create a Ghost Boot Camp partition and back up each file system? I am not sure if the latest version of Ghost supports the Mac OS Extended File System.

Thanks, AMartin. But WinClone has already been mentioned a couple of times and linked to in this thread.

Thanks! I just got my first intel based mac this week, and have not tried to use ghost yet (most likely will not based on comments in this thread).