Full system restore question

[RonaldMacDonald]

I have intel iMacs running 10.5.7. I use time machine to back up to external SATA drives that are 1 TB. If an internal drive breaks down and needs to be replaced, will I be able to restore the entire system from a backup drive?

Since I would need to open the machine and change the drive, could I just plug in one of my backup drives instead of doing a restore? If so, would it boot from the most recent backup?

Also, if I needed to buy a new Mac, could I do an automatic migrate from a USB drive instead of from another machine?

[earthsaver]

Time Machine backups aren't bootable. The way it works, you have to reinstall Mac OS X from the install/restore disc and tell Migration Assistant to transfer your data from your Time Machine backup.

[RonaldMacDonald]

Time Machine backups aren't bootable. The way it works, you have to reinstall Mac OS X from the install/restore disc and tell Migration Assistant to transfer your data from your Time Machine backup.

In order to use Migration Assistant, would the external drive have to be connect by firewire? Could I use a USB disk?

[earthsaver]

Sure. Not all Macs have FireWire now. You can migrate from any hard disk, connected physically or wirelessly.

[Satcomer]

To have a fully bootable external (OS X will boot from and external drive) then you need to "clone" your OS X drive. A freeware application that will do this for is Carbon Copy Cloner (http://www.bombich.com/index.html). A shareware application that is for people you know little about how OS X works (rsync) use Super Duper (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html). Now I see the word duper and think since CCC already does all this for free why would people pay almost $30 to have the same function of it.

Now with a Time Machine all you have to do is boot with the OS X install disk (with the time Machine attached) and in the beginning of the install it will ask f you want to restore from the last good Time Machine backup. My best friend had a disk drive go bad and this is how he only lost the time it took to get a new drive before he was back to almost the same exact point before the old drive crashed.

[fryke]

Or why even use CCC in this day and age... The creator of said software works with Apple on Disk Utility, which can restore (i.e. clone) drives on block level, which is TONS faster than cloning from a booted system instead of from the installation disc.

Just boot your installation disc (Leopard, Snow Leopard?) and go to Disk Utility. Go to restore, drop the source drive and destination drive in the respective fields and select "erase destination" to get block-level copying.

[djackmac]

Just boot your installation disc (Leopard, Snow Leopard?) and go to Disk Utility. Go to restore, drop the source drive and destination drive in the respective fields and select "erase destination" to get block-level copying.

I make .dmgs through disk utility almost daily for backing up customers drives. Works very well provided said drive and file system is in good condition. You can always use the restore feature in disk utility also to image from one drive to another. In this scenario you could have a drive ready to go whenever needed. Of course you would want to do this before you are having any issues.

Got to love OSX and disk utility. If more Windows techs/power users were aware of what very useful tools they are missing out on, Apple would have a much larger market share.

[mohaas05]

It seems odd nobody has mentioned this...

Just boot from your Leopard Install CD. Go to Utilities > Restore System from Backup.