SuperDuper?

Superduper yes requires some sort of volume that can store data. With its built-in scripting mechanism you can specify where you want the destination files to be. However, the only bootable type of solution which follows your needs is an external hard drive. And yes Superduper makes a bootable backup to any external hard drive that is Firewire that has that capability. Three I'm familiar with that do are http://www.macsales.com/ http://www.lacie.com/ and http://www.granitedigital.com/

Since you posted in the MacBook Pro forum, there have been some who have succeeded in making Intel Macs also bootable from external USB hard drives. Don't know which of those do support booting and not.

Mac OS X will boot on Mac OS X Server based networks, but that's a whole different story and something someone in the Mac OS X Server forum would better know how to work.

Hi elutz,

Do you have an iPod? You can enable it for disk mode, in the iPod preferences in iTunes.

Partition your internal drive and have SuperDuper! write to a disk image. Not the optimal solution, but it works given what you currently have.

Hi,

If you create a .dmg image can you use the system utilities from de system CD to restore it?

Thanks,
Oleguer

I'm pretty sure that SuperDuper will also allow you to back up to a disk image on your local drive. Then you could later copy that disk image to another hard drive, upload it to remote storage (network drive or something like .Mac), or maybe even burn it to a DVD (although it might not fit, depending on how big your backup is).

Of course, your goal should be to store the data somewhere other than your local drive so you can recover from a catastrophic hardware failure. Ideally, that external storage should also be kept in a different location from your main drive. So leave it at home if you mostly use your MBP out of the house, or keep the drive at work if you use your MBP mostly at home.

Personally, I keep my external FireWire drive at home for convenience since my MBP is usually with me anyway. I use SuperDuper to backup my entire MBP drive to it about once a week. Then, just in case I lose my MBP and my house burns down in the same day, I also keep my most important data on an encrypted disk image and upload to a network server at work. So at any given time, my most important items are in three different locations and on three different pieces of hardware.

I'm sorry elutz. I didn't read that part. No you can't boot fron an iPod.

A disk image is essentially a virtual disk stored on a hard drive. When you double click a disk image, it mounts in the Finder and looks and acts just like a separate hard drive volume, even though it's actually on the same physical disk as your boot volume. You've probably seen these in operation when doing drag-and-drop installations of software. This method is particularly popular with shareware.

To create a disk image, open /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app. Then go to File->New->Blank Disk Image... or File->New->Disk Image from Folder... and you'll get a dialog with several options for naming, compression, encryption, etc.

Choose your settings and click Save. Depending on how much data you've included, it may take a few seconds or minutes to complete. You can then mount the resulting disk image in the Finder to verify that all of your data got copied successfully.

Hope this helps.

Hi,

Does it make an image with all the HD information?

Regards,
Oleguer

superduper is great for creating bootable backups...i use it to clone my mac hard drive to a 100gb partition on my external drive....i was using the free version but paid for the full version which allows you to schedule backups as well as run fast updates, where it updates the clone but only files that have changed, so the backup takes fractions of the time....

i highly recommend this program...

skillz1318

Since you are familiar with SuperDuper could you tell me if it is able to back up your whole MBP if you have it partitioned with Boot Camp. Mine is this way and I show two Hard Drives on my desktop one for OSX and one for my Bootcamp partition.

you cannot backup the whole hard drive, since you have it partitioned they are basically 2 separate hard drives as far as superduper is concerned...i just back up my mac partition and i save all my windows apps/games on my external hard drive anyway so if i lost my windows partition and had to re-install windows i wouldn't lose anything....just the OS itself

you could always just back up both of them separately...