Ableton Forum

Hi, i want to do a full clean reinstall of osx on my Imac, but before i do this ill need a fast external hard drive to backup/clone my hard drive on to, any recommendations? Also ill need a program to clone my hard drive, is super duper any good? Cheers.

i use a freebee called iBackup and seagate drives sticked into icy boxes, does the job for me.

Just a tip - learn from my mistake: I password protected my external HD (maxtor) before upgrading from Tiger to Leopard and now Leopard refuses to recognise the HD! Apparently it's due to the password protection and I have to email Maxtor/Seagate support to get an application to access the HD again. Just a word of warning before your reinstall.

SuperDuper is what you need and is free for whole disc backups http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/ ... ption.html

CarbonCopyCloner, also ace, also free. If you get an external larger than your internal you should make a partition big enough to hold your internal. This way you can erase and do full backups etc and leave any other data unaffected.

muthafunka wrote:CarbonCopyCloner, also ace, also free. If you get an external larger than your internal you should make a partition big enough to hold your internal. This way you can erase and do full backups etc and leave any other data unaffected.

+1

You can actually do a complete backup with Time Machine as well too, when you reinstall OSX, you can reload all the data from the Time Machine back up:

http://www.bigbluelounge.com/forums/vie ... ht=machine

Using Carbon or Super Duper won't really give you a clean install, it'll give you exactly the same thing you have now, since it is a cloned copy.

i do not trust time machine. I have heard to many stories.

When I installed a new HD in my wife's MBP, I used her Time Machine backup to reinstall everything, worked great.

personally i think that in desktop situation full backup will be a losing of time. when you reinstall it's because you installed a lot of useless (often crappy) things.
you can say that you can restore an old working version, but that will be almost always an OLD snapshot.
i use to backup configuration with iBackup and just copy what i need to save elsewhere.

the most useful advice is: take a pen, a paper and write down what do you need and what are you worried about. in that way you are writing also the solution. sometimes

--edit
all above is true if you want to reinstall your system, not if you just bought a new HD and want to keep your old things having more space!

i personally love super duper and i use it as my backup solution on a regular basis. it is really fast when using "smart backup mode" (only copying modified files) and it offers the possibility to boot your mac straight from the cloned disk, so if your internal HD crashes, you can work on your mac until you got a new one.

Tarekith wrote:When I installed a new HD in my wife's MBP, I used her Time Machine backup to reinstall everything, worked great.

just be forewarned timemachine files have a tendency to become corrupt.

due to the nature of my work I have experience with many people who have ended up with useless TM backups.

Cheers for the fast replies.

Not sure what external HD to get, are these any good?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B000JVRQV6/

If not, any recommendations?