How to Backup your Hard Drive without Time Machine

Hi Csound,

ofcourse, a lot of people (and I also) often forget to mention that for all you must make backups, backups, backups... especially in such cases as this (but also in all other cases). Thank you for the "correction". Happy to see you around (I was away a long time and will be gone again in a week for a long time).

LexSchellings wrote:

Hi Csound,

ofcourse, a lot of people (and I also) often forget to mention that for all you must make backups, backups, backups... especially in such cases as this (but also in all other cases). Thank you for the "correction". Happy to see you around (I was away a long time and will be gone again in a week for a long time).

Hi Lex

Sadly, backup seems to be the forgotten child for many posters. They will allocate time and money to replace their operating system but nothing at all to safeguarding their stuff, until it is too late.

You say you have sufficient room on the external HDD. Why not transferring everything from the 400GB partition to the 1.6TB partition? Then you have the 400GB partition free. make this partion smaller, say 200GB: you need only the existing space on the internal plus say 50GB.

Now you use CCC and clone your drive to this partition, then upgrade the internal disk to Lion, and never clone again. Then you have Lion and SL to start from.

Edit:

"you need only the existing space..." read "You need only the existing space in use..."

darkhorse85 wrote:

This sounds like a good plan, is Carbon Copy Cloner free?

It used to be, but since AppStore and Gatekeeper on 10.8 CCC had to go commercial to remain relevant on Mac's. 😟

darkhorse85 wrote:

This sounds like a good plan, is Carbon Copy Cloner free?

There is a 30 day free trial that you can use, get it here.

darkhorse85 wrote:

Is there an equally good FREE alternative to CCC that I could longterm (i.e. no limitions no trial periods).

I am currently using the 400GB "Backup Disk" partition exclusively for Time Machine, could it cause any any problems moving these by files to the other partition?

Don't cheap out on your stuff. You can use CCC's free trial (same function as paid) to make the clone and decide whether you want to buy it later. (I already posted a link)

Get another drive, do not play with your Time Machine drive.

darkhorse85 wrote:

Is there an equally good FREE alternative to CCC that I could longterm (i.e. no limitions no trial periods).

SuperDuper costs a bit less. But seriously, given the amount of money you spent on your Mac, and the value of the data, and the cost of data recovery services, CCC and SuperDuper are dirt cheap. They are both well worth the cost. If you are using your Mac for business, then you know how much your time and data is worth and either utility will essentially pay for itself almost immediately.

For a one-time clone, you can use Apple Disk Utility.

If you are good with the Unix command line, I understand that rsync can do much the same thing for free, but I wouldn't call it "equally good" due to the UI.

Network 23 wrote:

darkhorse85 wrote:

Is there an equally good FREE alternative to CCC that I could longterm (i.e. no limitions no trial periods).

SuperDuper costs a bit less. But seriously, given the amount of money you spent on your Mac, and the value of the data, and the cost of data recovery services, CCC and SuperDuper are dirt cheap. They are both well worth the cost. If you are using your Mac for business, then you know how much your time and data is worth and either utility will essentially pay for itself almost immediately.

If you are good with the Unix command line, I understand that rsync can do much the same thing for free, but I wouldn't call it "equally good" due to the UI.

FYI Network23, CCC will back up the recovery partition, SD won't, for now I suggest CCC.

To the OP

If your data is not worth $30 to you it is not worth backing up.

$40 for CCC is two trips for a family to BurgerKing.

What is worth more ... your data or some cheap greasy burgers?

I got it, though it is a very distant memory of a gentler time (maybe only in my mind 😕). 😉

mende1 wrote:

You don't need any application. Just drag the files you want to backup to the external disk

And that will exclude all hidden files, user and system.