Backing up 10.3.9 before installing Tiger

dduck

Registered
Hi,

I am about to embark on upgrading my GFs Powerbook. It currently runs 10.3.9. For my peace of mind I would like to:

1) Know how to do a full backup to an external harddisk (USB 2 Lacie is purchased for this purpose)

2) How to restore from the backup in case of disaster

As it is her main work machine for University purposes and exams are coming up, I forsee that the wedding will be called off if I screw it up ;)

An anybody point me to the right information? I have installed and used the "Backup" utility from .Mac, but it seems that it only backups the home folder etc., which is not sufficiently comprehensive IMHO - I want the ability to restore a fully working system from scratch.
 
Don't use .Mac's Backup. You should download Carbon Copy Cloner from Versiontracker.com and when you run it, you say copy your Powerbook hard drive volume to the USB 2 Lacie drive and you will have a perfect clone. If you need to go back, just boot up the Powerbook off a CD, run Carbon Copy cloner and copy from the Lacie to the Powerbook hard drive.
 
All well and good, except CCC does not work with an USB2 drive - at least not on this 12" PB :(

Any other suggestions? Disk tool won't let me do an image of the boot disk because it is in use, so I guess that is out...
 
OK, update:
I found that the reason I couldn't do a restore to the LaCie disk from the internal HD in the PB was that the external drive was formatted FAT. Once I reformatted it HFS I could restore to it with no problem at all. The error message ("An error (2) occurred") could have been a lot more helpful tho :(
 
AFAIK Disk Utility _does_ let you do it if you use it from the Tiger installation disk. But if CCC works now, I'd use that, too.
 
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