Last night I did the apples software update and the upgraded os x 10.6.8 was available so I let it rip. Well it bricked my iMac. This morning I re- installed from my original snow leopard disk and restored the system with out issue.
So I did the apple on line install again and bricked it up again. I am now just restoring from my June 22nd time machine back up and will not be up grading until apple fixes this issue and releases some patches or something. So just be careful and have your start up disk handy.
Yeh, I know, I am actually pretty new to the Mac platform. Being a harden PC user for almost 20+ years, when I moved to Mac I am completely smitten by how smooth and trouble free it is that I thought its completely problem free! Silly me.
I just did a solid 3 hours of research it seems best bet is to go with an external hard drive and Carbon Copy Cloner for byte-by-byte backup (Just how I like it. I have been using Norton Ghost then Acronis trueImage user for the past 7 years and they never fail me - if catastrophic failure occur I just pop backup image back in and everything is back to normal within 30 minutes).
BTW, any recommendation for the external hard drive for MAC? I prefer portable - currently looking at Apple’s Time Capsule (seems outrageously expensive), Western Digital’s My Passport (seems to have a lot of failures - I personally had experience with it on PC side), Seagate’s FreeAgent GoFlex (never had experience with it, but I had Seagate hdd before and I always think they are loud and clunky)…last one I am looking at is G-Tech 500GB G-DRIVE Slim seems to have a lot of great reviews.
Well, some sort of backup system is always mandatory. Your computer will die eventually, and you don’t want all your files to die with it. Preferably you want some sort of redundancy system wherein your backup is also backed up at least once. A game can easily take a year or more to make, you don’t want all of that progress to be lost.
Personally I’d recommend Time Machine. It’s kind of like a simple version control system for everything. When I started using OS X 10.6, I figured I would just keep using CCC like usual, but after trying Time Machine for a while, I ditched CCC and just use TM now.
And yeah, all hard drives will eventually fail even if they are inside a Mac.
Just Time Machine? As I understand Time Machine only backs up user files but not system files or programs. So in case of catastrophic failures - you are going to reinstall the OSX, then all the updates, then all your programs before you can import your time machine files over right?
I am thinking to go with CCC because its free, and its most like what I have setup for my windows machine - one click whole hard drive clone so I don’t have to worry - its all back to the way it should be byte by byte.
No, Time Machine backs up 100% of everything (unless you tell it specifically not to back something up). In case of total failure, you can just restore from Time Machine. It’s part of the OS, and it’s not even one click, it’s completely automated (although you can make it one click instead if you want). CCC is only free if you choose not to pay for it, but that’s not very nice.
I updated my MacBook Pro and Mac Pro without any hassles, so it seems that was just a very specific problem with a very specific machine … and I’m with Eric regarding Time Machine: It’s super-smooth and you can even hook your Time Machine backup to a brand new Mac, and after restoring you can immediately continue working as if you were on the same machine. It’s these “little things” that make me never want to go back to using Windows machines (I do still use Windows a lot, there’s nothing like Visual Studio - but I only use it under VMWare Fusion on Mac OS, which btw, gives me similar comfort: move the VMWare image to another machine and work as if nothing had changed … could even be a Windows machine, if I wanted to ).
Gosh, it’s crazy to remember the hassles when you had to set up a new PC and install everything from scratch (not sure if MS fixed this with Vista or Windows 7, but would be interesting to know).
To be honest, I didn’t even know about CCC … I think Time Machine backs up everything except for the OS itself - but certainly including any configuration. That’s probably one of the benefits of all configuration being stored in simple files (Registry, I’m looking at you ). Same with “installing” applications - usually all you do is copy the .app-package and that’s it. Uninstalling is then just a matter of deleting that package.
There’s exceptions to that, though … even on the Mac not everything is perfect
Yeh I thought so. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to clone the whole hard disk when its in its optimum mint condition? And its just a one button restore process if something goes wrong (instead of installing every program you have on one by one)
I setup Time Machine after some forum posts exchange with jashan about Visual Studio/VMWare. I hooked up an external Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk and do back everything up, I only excluded the Windows Folder, I don’t know if that would be restored/VMWare stuff? Not sure. So far never needed to restore anything… finger crossed :), I hope it’s all in the back up
There is a portable version of the Free Agent external disk but it is more expensive although the Firewire adapter is a bit cheaper for the portable disk.
Never tried Time Machine before… I was manually backing up worthwhile files to an external disk, Time Machine revealed to be super easy… so no manual back ups now, just let Time Machine do its hourly stuff
No. Where does this misconception come from? It backs up EVERYTHING!
It IS a one-button restore process. You boot up your restore DVD, and choose “Restore from Time Machine” in Disk Utility. That option would obviously not exist if it weren’t possible to restore the entire system from TM.
So, when I restore a TimeMachine backup of an older Mac OS X version on a new Mac, I’d have to update Mac OS afterwards? That sounds weird to me and actually I think it didn’t happen that way when I last tried - but maybe I’m mistaken, it’s been a while. I thought TimeMachine was smart enough to not have to do that. Seems a little redundant to me to include the OS itself but I haven’t checked that so I guess Eric is right. With “OS” I mean only the stuff that’s on the DVD, though. Any OS configuration is obviously backed up - otherwise it couldn’t work the way it does.
And certainly you wouldn’t have to install any program - that’s done by TimeMachine because that is backed up. Of course: I’d exclude VMWare images from TimeMachine because those are huge files that change all the time … so for VMWare images, I do manual backups every few months (there’s not much on there that needs backup because I use VMWare images only for development - so any of the changes are in TFS version control anyways; in case of failure, all I need to do is get the old manual backup, do a “Get Latest Version”, Windows update … and I’m back online ).
If you’re restoring the whole system, of course, that’s what you’d expect. But if you have an already-functioning Mac and you just want to copy some files over, there’s no reason why you’d restore the whole system.
How could you restore your system properly without it?
Indeed, if you don’t exclude that sort of thing from TM backups, you quickly fill the drive with mostly redundant data. You’d probably want to backup any VMs with their own system if you use them frequently.
Actually, I thought I did exclude VMWare images but what i did initially was exclude a folder with some windows stuff… which now I include. So I double checked and I don’t think I know how to exclude VMWare images, I fired on VMWare and have Windows running, then I go to Time Machine Options to the Exclude items from backups window… but I cannot locate the VMWare image anywhere from there… what am I missing? (probably my spectacles)
