Backing up my entire MBP (Mountain Lion)

Use the Disk Utility’s Restore feature or a product such as Carbon Copy Cloner.

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Basic Backup

For some people Time Machine will be more than adequate. Time Machine is part of OS X. There are two components:

1. A Time Machine preferences panel as part of System Preferences;

2. A Time Machine application located in the Applications folder. It is

used to manage backups and to restore backups. Time Machine

requires a backup drive that is at least twice the capacity of the

drive being backed up.

3. Time Machine requires a backup drive that is at least double the

capacity of the drive(s) it backs up.

Alternatively, get an external drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility.

Clone Yosemite, Mavericks, Lion/Mountain Lion using Restore Option of Disk Utility

Boot to the Recovery HD:

Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.

1. Select Disk Utility from the main menu then press the Continue

button.

2. Select the destination volume from the left side list.

3. Click on the Restore tab in the DU main window.

4. Select the destination volume from the left side list and drag it

to the Destination entry field.

5. Select the source volume from the left side list and drag it to

the Source entry field.

6. Double-check you got it right, then click on the Restore button.

Destination means the external backup drive. Source means the internal startup drive.

You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):

1. Carbon Copy Cloner

2. Get Backup

3. Deja Vu

4. SuperDuper!

Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files. For help with using Time Machine visit Pondini's Time Machine FAQ for help with Time Machine.

Although you can buy a complete external drive system, you can also put one together if you are so inclined. It's relatively easy and only requires a Phillips head screwdriver (typically.) You can purchase hard drives separately. This gives you an opportunity to shop for the best prices on a hard drive of your choice. Reliable brands include Seagate, Hitachi, Western Digital, Toshiba, and Fujitsu. You can find reviews and benchmarks on many drives at Storage Review.

Enclosures for FireWire and USB are readily available. You can find only FireWire enclosures, only USB enclosures, and enclosures that feature multiple ports. I would stress getting enclosures that use the Oxford chipsets especially for Firewire drives (911, 921, 922, for example.) You can find enclosures at places such as;

1. Cool Drives

2. OWC

3. WiebeTech

4. Firewire Direct

5. California Drives

6. NewEgg

All you need do is remove a case cover, mount the hard drive in the enclosure and connect the cables, then re-attach the case cover. Usually the only tool required is a small or medium Phillips screwdriver.

Note that since Intel-based Macs use EFI as the boot mechanism, you can partition a physical drive into as many volumes as you like and each can be bootable.

In other words, you can split the 5TB into slices large enough to hold the current contents of the Macs, clone using Disk Utility (slow but free) or Carbon Copy Cloner (fast and even incremental, but for a cost) and leave the rest for future use. Do a Get Info on the Macs' boot volume (usually Macintosh HD) to determine what's the exact amount of room being used, just add at least 2-3 times the amount of RAM for swap space in case you need to boot from the clone.

Edit: should have known that blazin'-fingers Kappy was back in the saddle....

Hi Nicholas:

The easiest way to backup your Macs are using Carbon Copy Cloner. https://bombich.com/ It will allow you to make a complete bootable backup of your Mac.

You said you are using a 5TB drive and you have 4 Macs.

Each Carbon Copy Cloner backup for each mac will need its own volume.

So the easiest way is to partition your new drive as 5 partitions. One for each Mac and an extra one for whatever.

Each partition will have to be large enough for each Mac. So if your Mac has a 500 GB hard drive, make the partition for that Mac 500 GB.

Here is some information from CCC. https://bombich.com/kb/ccc4/i-want-backup-multiple-machines-or-hard-drives-same- hard-drive

Here is another link on how to prepare your drive. https://bombich.com/kb/ccc4/preparing-your-backup-disk-backup-os-x

Also here is a video of how to use CCC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30sEXyINS44

Kim

1. Unless you have a reason to do something different, create five 1TB partitions formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

2. You can just clone each computer. You won’t need to contact the Mac App Store, or encounter any similar issues as long as you only boot each computer from its own clone. If you start up a Mac from a clone of a different computer, the Mac and OS need to be compatible, a small number of preferences, such as the Energy Saver ones, won’t carry over, and some commercial software may refuse to run.

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The partitions will remain bootable regardless of size

Hi Nicholas:

Look under About this Mac for each computer

and select Storage.

In my case I have a 500 GB drive, so I would make that partition 500 GB, even though the space used on disk is less that 200 GB.

And you could also name each partition. i.e. MacBook Pro_2011, etc.

By the way CCC is only $40.00. Well worth it in my opinion.

Kim

If you want to use Disk Utility, once you have selected the DEVICE corresponding to the drive, you can partition (and make sure it is formatted in GUID/Apple Extended (Journaled) scheme, visit the Options button. Most drives come in MBR/NTFS format nowadays and that won't work) Once that is done, go to the Restore tab and "restore" the Mac's Macintosh HD volume onto the corresponding partition of the external. Since it is an exact byte-for-byte copy, it is bootable by definition. The old "blessing the system folder" days of pre-OS X are long gone.

Strictly speaking, for the clone you only need it the size of the occupied space plus room for memory swap space. Especially if it is just for backup purposes and not that you expect to boot and work from it from now on.

If you want infallibility you buy multiple drives instead of a big monster that can fail only once to make your life miserable.

Nicholas Robinson1 wrote:

Kim

The price is not really a concern (well, as long as it's less than $40!) but I need to know that this will be infallible.

One good thing going for me is that I'm not messing with multiple versions of the OS (Yosemite, Leopard, Mountain Lion etc) but as someone else mentioned, there ARE other 3rd-party options—what makes CCC the best choice, in your opinion?

Unlike the competition CCC can transfer the recovery partition as well as the rest of the data. If that doesn't matter to you it is the only advantage CCC has over other methods.

The volume you’re putting the clone on needs to have the same amount of space as the OS would need on the original volume. Since a clone is a one-shot copy of the original, no space beyond that used by the clone and the OS is needed.

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