Filed under: Tips and tricks, Leopard
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
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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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Ryan said 2:36PM on 1-29-2008
I have my leopard disk ripped to a 15 gig partition (room to grow heh) as well as my time machine backup on another partition of my lacie drive. Is this what you mean?
My only question is if I can actually restore my mac from just this one drive. Will time machine look at another partition on the same hard drive it is mounted on?
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Michael Rose said 2:42PM on 1-29-2008
Yep, that should work just fine. The hint actually suggests putting the DVD image on the same partition as the backups, but either way is OK.
Ed said 6:01PM on 1-29-2008
I do the same, but with separate partitions for each of my MacBook's restore discs, a 250 GB Time Machine partition, and the rest for data (on a 500 GB drive.) Works fine for me, but whatever floats your external drive...
As for a secondary bootable partition, Michael, I believe if your external drive is formated with a GUID partition table you should be able to install a bootable system straight from the install disc(s.) If not, however, I know that you can with Pacifist, the awesome OS X install package manager. Pop in your disk, select "Open Apple Install Discs," and once it's loaded you can install to any OS X supported volume.
Anthony said 2:44PM on 1-29-2008
I use a big hd partitioned in two. One holds a bootable clone of the OS. This is my backup of apps and the system. The other is for Time Machine. I't only backs up my email, documents folder, music etc. This way my Time Machine drive will last a good long time. :)
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Dave said 3:07PM on 1-29-2008
What simple yet ingenious idea.
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Hank said 3:27PM on 1-29-2008
Isn't it easier to just keep your DVD around?
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Michael Rose said 3:29PM on 1-29-2008
Easier, maybe. Slower, definitely. More likely to cause you to panic when you can't lay hands on it and your hard drive has crashed: absolutely.
Ed said 6:03PM on 1-29-2008
Yeah, and easier to scratch.
Dave M. said 3:43PM on 1-29-2008
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!
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Red said 3:48PM on 1-29-2008
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?
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Eliah Hecht said 4:08PM on 1-29-2008
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.
Ari said 3:56PM on 1-29-2008
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.
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Ari said 4:03PM on 1-29-2008
And I meant to say, Time Machine may take up all available space. I don't know for sure.
Michael Rose said 4:14PM on 1-29-2008
Hi Ari --
The DVD clone is meant for booting from read-only media, so it won't need any swap space (part of what makes this so handy). Some commenters at macosxhints have noted that Time Machine seems to leave a buffer on the target drive, so you might be OK for disk space even if your system build did require writeable swap.
ocellnuri said 4:17PM on 1-29-2008
If you're actually installing a copy of OS X on the external, I imagine this may become an issue. However, if you're copying the Install DVD to the drive, it won't need scratch space since it was designed to run off of a ROM disc to start with. (I'm guessing)
ocellnuri said 4:19PM on 1-29-2008
Ah, Michael beat me to it as I was writing. :-)
Tom said 5:17PM on 1-29-2008
This may be a stupid question, but how do you boot the image of a CD off an attached external USB hard drive?
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Michael Rose said 5:41PM on 1-29-2008
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.
Tom said 5:58PM on 1-29-2008
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
Matt L said 5:23PM on 1-29-2008
yeah doesn't this apply to external firewire or internal drives only?
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