Drive died, what are the odds :)

[larswik]

Wow, I was just posting here a couple of days ago and just go my External Raid backed up to a different drive and the next one of the drives failed! Talk about a close call. Replaced it with a new drive and things are good again after restoring.

 

I have a new problem now. After that failure I thought I would check my system with disk utilities and it found a problem on my boot drive. I launched off of the disc that came with my Mac to repair but it can't fix something so it recommended backing up and erasing the drive.

 

Right now I am freeing up up space on my FireWire drive (150 megs) for my internal drive which is also 150 meg drive.

 

What is the best way of doing this kind of back up with Retrospect so everything goes back to where it is supposed to be? Once I erase the system drive I erase Retrospect. I read the part of booting up off of the disc that came with Retrospect but I don;t know what the best method is to back up my drive in the first place and then restore it. It thought I would ask for some help so this goes smoothly.

 

Thanks,

 

-Lars

[CallMeDave]

Quote:

---

What is the best way of doing this kind of back up with Retrospect so everything goes back to where it is supposed to be?

 

---

 

In this case, you're not looking to perform a backup per se, you're looking to provide yourself with a duplicate of your drive data and copy it onto new hardware. I wouldn't use Retrospect for this.

 

First thing, before you erase anything, make sure you have copies of your data _in addition_ to whatever you're using for this duplicate dance. Murphy's Law states clearly that the moment you erase your (problematic but working) internal drive, your little FireWire drive is gonna start making groaning noises and go up in flames.

 

That being said, you can use Disk Utility to create a disk image of your internal drive, erase your internal, and then restore everything back using the image. You'll do the whole thing while booted from the OS X instal DVD:

 

- Boot the Leopard install DVD and when the Tools/Utilities menu appears, start Disk Utility

- Click on the icon for your internal drive's OS X partition

- Click "New Image" from the toolbar

- In the destination dialog box, choose the name of your external drive

- For image type, choose Read Only. The default is "compressed," but this is extremely slow

 

Then (assuming, as I noted above, that you have multiple, verified, tested and working backups of your critical data):

 

- Click on the "Restore" tab

- Click on the "Image..." button on the right side of the Source field

- Navigate to your external drive and locate the disk image you created in the steps above

- Drag and drop the icon of your internal drive into the Destination field

- Check the "Erase destination" checkbox

 

The restore operation uses Apple Software Restore to do a block copy of the data, which will be _much_ fast then the file-by-file method that Retrospect would have to use. Type "man asr" into a Terminal window if you want to learn everything there is to know about this powerful tool.

 

After you're back up and running with your happy disk directory, use Retrospect to create a File Backup Set on your FireWire drive to perform regular incremental backups of whatever data you want to protect.

 

 

Dave