Re: backup options for newly configured Macbook

In article <1156211914.615050.162830@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Grant" <qzectb@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I've just switched from the Windows world to the Mac world by buying a
MacBook, and I spent a solid week-and-a-half installing about 20 GB of
added software and data, including Bootcamp w/ Windows XP. Now that
I've got things more or less the way I want them, I'd like to know how
take a snapshot of the current state of the system so that I can easily
recover it if something breaks.

In the past, working with Windows, I found that it was easy to back up
user files but difficult to restore software installations and system
settings in a single operation -- this was apparently because of all
the registry settings that had to be restored as well as the
application files themselves.

My impression is that Mac OS X, because it is built on FreeBSD unix,
doesn't have any garbage like registries but stores everything in
ordinary files. If this is true, then it seems to me the unix command
'dump' command just might be useful for full as well as incremental
backups -- I'd just have to do a dump to a suitable external device.
Does anyone have any experience with this? Or should I get a
commercial backup program like Retrospect?

With any backup system in the past, the major annoyance for me has been
writing and cataloging countless CDs, Exabyte tapes, or what have you.
Would I be better off getting an external hard drive and periodically
mirroring the onboard disk? In fact, would it be possible to do this
in such a way that if the onboard disk died, I could simply boot
directly off the backup disk and be back in operation immediately?

Thanks for any help, and apologies if this is a totally redundant bunch
of questions.

I doubt dump will work, but connect a firewire external drive and try
it. A better way is to use the disk utility's restore feature. Just
restore your boot drive to an external drive, then verify the external
drive is intact by booting from it.

If you want more flexility, get a copy of SuperDuper, which is shareware
from

<http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html>
.

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