backup copy

[Slowdive]

so just to mention a simple question:

what, if you were - say - a frustrated developer, working with osx on a new architecture model. and contacted the osx developers, cause it crashes. and all they do is to help you out by adjusting this and that. and what if it happens all the time - and you think: whoo. 5hours of telephone calls to get some help. i had a windowspc once. and sometimes all i did was reinstalling the whole thing. and it worked afterwards. and the reinstallation took 1,2 hours.

ok - lets think you have got the opportunity to decide on a 5hour and a 1,2 hour thing. lets also think, you decide for the last option.

all the stupid thing is: you have a nice working machine at home, sometimes crashing, sometimes working, sometimes 5 hours of wait. but no reinstall-cd around.

what would you do? think: you have - after a 5 hour coffee-break - a working osx machine. a dreams pops in your head: how could i make a backup of my system. and the dreams says: the backup of my system should work as a reinstallation-package if anything is thrown to pieces on your pc. but the dream ends up bad.

one devil comes - telling you, he googled, but didnt found a single how-to-do-faq on the net, especially not on the places the common user visits first. so - for once more - the dreams of a backup ends up bad.

another devil comes - telling you, that no friend-devils could help, even if he can help them in another way. in advance.

shattered dreams.
maybe someone could just take a nap on this? Smile

[PPC_Digger]

Here is a standard UNIX method (I'm sure Toast has something easier & less complicated):
First, you have to make sure you have another partition except the one you want to backup. Then, you need to have some UNIX, you can download Darwin, then burn it, boot from it (by holding C while the mac boots). You'll get to a point where it asks you where to install. Type 'shell' and press Enter. Then, type "mount /dev/disk0s3 /mnt" (replace /dev/disk0s3 with the partition you want to back up on, if it's not disk0s3). Type "dd if=/dev/disk0s2 | bzip2 /mnt/backup.img" (replace /dev/disk0s2 with the partition you want to back up) and let it work. To restore the backup, do the same process again, but instead of the last command, type "bzcat /mnt/backup.img | dd of=/dev/disk0s2" (again, replace disk0s2 with the partition to restore the image on).

btw It will compress the image while creating it so you don't have to compress it manually.