how do i make a copy of my hard drive?

[jeppa]

i want to make a back up of my imac hard drive on an external drive. i want to sell this imac and keep my stuff on a drive so i can get at it. should i clone the hard drive or just drag folders one by one to the ext drive? i have carbon copy cloner but i can't get it to find a target disk!

[barhar]

'... should i clone the hard drive ...' - this is you only option if the iMac is booted from MacOS X.

'... or just drag folders one by one to the ext drive? ...' - this is not an option with the iMac booted from MacOS X. You will inevitably come across an alert stating that a file cannot be copied, etc. If you can boot the iMac with System 9.2.2 or earlier - you can then just drag the icon of the iMac's boot drive onto a destination drive; all items (files [application and document] and folders) should be copied.

'i have carbon copy cloner but i can't get it to find a target disk' - interesting; and, the format of the external drive is?
Then, there is also - 'SuperDuper'.

[MacGizmo]

Either of the apps previously mentioned will do the trick, however you should consider this:

If you're going to move all your files to a new/different computer, you should NOT simply clone your existing drive and image it to the new Mac. Any issues you may have had (even the ones you didn't know you had) will be transferred to the new machine. You should always install the OS and your applications normally (from CDs) on a new machine. Your personal files (documents, photos, music, videos, etc.) can easily be copied folder-by-folder. This method is MUCH safer in the long run.

Now if you were cloning the disk simply as a backup for the SAME machine, then cloning the entire drive would be a perfectly safe method.

Just my 2 cents!

[artov]

I use rdiff-backup as my backup program. It makes copy of the disk, but as name implies, it stores difference. This means that if only one file has changed after previous backup, only one file is copied. Restore from the backup is simple: copy everything back (or, if you need to restore to some specific date, you need to use rdiff-backup itself).

Also one reason I use rdiff-backup is, that there is also Linux version, so I can use same program both on my Linux PC and on Mac.

[jeppa]

thanks for the tips. actually what i want to do is have my files on a hard drive to use with a different computer-i don't want to transfer them. i just want to get at them from different machines. maybe it's not possible.

[macworks]

If you're just copying files out of your home directory, you shouldn't run into any issues. Just go ahead and copy them.

However, you should make sure the drive your copying too has been formatted by a Mac. Mac OS Extended (Journalled) is best.

If you're trying to get all the applications and stuff, you might be asked for your admin password when copying them through the Finder.

Carbon Copy Cloner should work if the destination drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended (journalled or not). If it's not working, try repairing the destination disk with Apple's Disk Utility. You might also need to download the latest version of CCC. If I remember right, you need an older version if you're on 10.2 or earlier.

[ra3ndy]

CCC supports these configurations:
* Local (i.e., not over a network connection), HFS+ formatted partition or hard drive.
* Mounted disk image. Cloning to a disk image will (obviously), not yield a bootable volume unless you use CCC to restore the image to a physical partition or disk.
* Firewire disks including iPods
* CCC will not backup directly to CDs or DVD-R discs, though you can backup to an appropriately sized disk image, then burn the image to disc with Toast or Disk Copy.
* Any machine that supports Mac OS X (officially)..


Notice that it won't clone to an external drive if it isn't FireWire. USB & USB 2.0 aren't supported.

The reasoning for this is kind of basic. Macs (PowerPC based, at least) can't boot from USB, thus you can't clone a boot volume to a USB drive.

If all you need is access to your old files, then just copy the folders that contain your data. It'll save space on your external drive that would otherwise be wasted on cache files, etc.