Make your Time Machine drive more useful and more boot-iful

As we've mentioned recently, one of the conditions for a successful bare-metal restore of a Time Machine backup is a Leopard install DVD; you boot from the DVD, choose your backup as source material, wait some number of hours, and then you're back in business. Wouldn't it be good, wondered a tipster at Macosxhints.com, if you could combine the need for a DVD with all that lovely free space on your Time Machine drive and somehow accelerate this process?

Enter the "you got your peanut butter in my chocolate" solution: before you set up your Time Machine backups, use Disk ~~Copy~~ Utility to clone your Leopard DVD onto the blank hard drive. Once Time Machine is running, it should leave the DVD clone alone and simply use the rest of the drive for data. If you ever need to recover from a catastrophic failure, you've got a bootable Time Machine restore drive that acts just like the Leopard DVD.

My idle question (and one I plan to test when I can) is if you can actually install a lean system, perhaps with some key utilities and tools, alongside your Time Machine data; boot from that when you need to, and do repairs/recovery before moving on to the restore process. It would almost certainly be safer to carve off a small boot partition (20 GB would be ample) and set up a bare-bones boot environment, but it would be fun to try it all on the same volume and see what happens. Of course, when you hear "fun" and "backups" in the same sentence, turn tail and run.

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Source: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=200801162336502…

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Tips and tricks Leopard

As we've mentioned recently, one of the conditions for a successful bare-metal restore of a Time Machine backup is a Leopard install DVD;...

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Nathan

It would have been great if TimeMachine automatically did bootable backups with restorable checkpoints. Supposedly the upcoming Leopard compatible version of SuperDuper will work with TimeMachine to this possible.

I wrote a OSX backup strategy guide today, and other blogs today are talking about backups and data recovery. Are sunspots killing our drives or something?

January 31 2008 at 5:04 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Maxwell

Disk Copy? You still running 10.2??

January 29 2008 at 10:38 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Maxwell's comment

Michael Rose

Uh, yeah. That should say "Disk Utility." Oops.

January 29 2008 at 11:51 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

I have a time machine disk, and I want to put a clone of the install dvd on separate partition. Does the install dvd clone have to be on the first partition of the hard disk?

January 29 2008 at 8:24 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

John Bailey (BDog)

I use CCC scheduled tasks for backups. They run when the volume is mounted, one 3.5" drive is a complete bootable (no "DVD" image needed) backup (weekly) of my current system, and i have another 2.5" drive for home folder backups (daily) that i carry with me. And then of course another 3.5" drive with a full bootable backup (~ every 3 months) that is offsite (at my Mom's house) for disaster recovery incase of fire/theft.

January 29 2008 at 7:03 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Tom

you can do it with firewire too? how will the computer know to book the CD imagine on the HD?

January 29 2008 at 5:32 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Matt

yeah doesn't this apply to external firewire or internal drives only?

January 29 2008 at 5:22 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Tom

This may be a stupid question, but how do you boot the image of a CD off an attached external USB hard drive?

January 29 2008 at 5:17 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

2 replies to Tom's comment

Michael Rose

Intel machines are USB-bootable: http://www.tuaw.com/2006/02/08/intel-macs-can-boot-from-usb-drives/

Some PPC machines are USB-bootable (more in 10.4 and 10.5 than previous): http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060301112336384

All Macs with a Firewire port can boot from an external Firewire device. If the DVD is cloned to the drive, that makes it a bootable device as far as the Mac is concerned.

January 29 2008 at 5:41 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Tom

This could help solve an issue with a system restore from time machine with the Macbook Air....it eliminates the need for the actual CD drive, if you back up to a wired external HDD

January 29 2008 at 5:58 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

procon

The advantage of keeping it all on one partition is that space will be used efficiently. The flip side is that Time Machine will take every megabyte of free space and not leave Mac OS X enough room for a scratch disk.

January 29 2008 at 3:55 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

4 replies to procon's comment

Red

I have a hard drive that Time Machine has been backing up to since early November. Is there anyway to add the Leopard DVD at this point?

January 29 2008 at 3:47 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Red's comment

Eliah Hecht

Yes, you can certainly do that. Just restore (using Disk Utility) from the Leopard DVD onto the hard drive in question, make sure you leave the "Erase Destination" box *unchecked*, and it should go fine.

January 29 2008 at 4:08 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Dave M.

Yep, Leo Laporte and gang over at TWiT suggested doing just this not long after Leopard and Time Machine was released. I partitioned my 1TB HDD and used SuperDuper! to create a bootable Leopard install image for just this reason.

I haven't had a need to use the Leopard image yet, but I have booted from it once to make sure it was bootable. I suspect this method will work just fine for restoring a Time Machine backup. It's not going to be a speed demon like using SuperDuper!, but it should get the job done.

I have used Time Machine to restore a drive that died on me a month or so ago. That worked wonderfully. It really saved my backside!

January 29 2008 at 3:43 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply