Disk Backup/Cloning best practice in present days MAC environment

Hello, I will probably re-switch on MAC Laptop soon ( last time I owned a G3) and was wondering if things have changed since then....:

What I do with my windows machine :

I use Acronis True Image to build an image of the OS partition along with software ( except data stored in a different partition) and save it in two different places, one of them an external USB drive.

In case of virus/driver problem/damaged OS but still bootable, I recover from the image right trough the Acronis software installed on windows.
If the OS is not bootable, I can use the Bootable Rescue CD that I can build with the same software, boot the PC with it and voila'...

I remember in G3 days I used Carbon Copy Cloner to save -not "images"- but snapshot of the OS partition to external drive and eventually recover the main OS partition booting from it, just in case. Can it still be done in Intel/Leopard days ?

I also remember that the external boot could be performed only from a firewire drive, is it still this way, or can I use a normal USB drive ( HPS+ formatted) ??

And, last question : is the 800 Fw physical port compatible with a 400 ? ( can I plug my M-Audio Firewire audio device straight to a MBP with a normal FW cable ?)

Thank you for the reply..

Andrea

 

I want to say that Time Machine, which is built-into OSX Leopard, will do what you're asking for but I have a suspicion that it might not do everything you want.

It does incremental backups of your entire drive and you can either recover individual files, folders etc... from any incremental backup image on the fly or you could restore the whole drive image (again, any incremental image; old one or the latest one etc...) to the same HD or a whole new HD if your drive ever fails.

And it works with USB drives as well as FW drives.

As far as 400 vs 800, the FW ports are different.

 

Yea carbon copy cloner is still around, and it still works. It works with any external drive. USB, FW, esata.

And yes FW800 is compatible with FW400, you just need a FW400 to 800 cable and you can use any device you want.

 

I'm using CCC for my backup needs and so far it saved me already several times. It works fast and without any complains. Recommended.

 

I love Carbon Copy Cloner, and I used it in my previous generation Macbook just fine to exchange HDD's.

 

Thank you guys, now I know that my houskeeping in MAC environment will be almost untroubled as is in windows one.

I am curious...: what about the bootcamp partition..? Can CCC take care, or maybe Acronis TI can ? I guess it dipends on what kind of filesystem is being used ( HPS+ or NTFS)...

Ciao

Andrea

 

For bootcamp partition use WinClone. You can use within osx.