Suggestions for mirroring a MacBook Pro and a G5 to a firewire drive??

[djbeta]

Hi there,

My MacBook Pro is my primary machine and I'd like to back it up automatically so that if the hardware fails, I can reboot another mac from a clone of the system.

I bought a 500Gb Firewire drive, and am wondering if anyone can give me suggestions for how to proceed.

I was thinking of creating a 160Gb partition and then doing something with either Carbon Copy Cloner, Super Duper, or perhaps SoftRaid.

Ideally, I'd like to just plug in the drive and have the mirroring happen automatically-- that's why I was thinking perhaps SoftRaid might be best, because it would automatically rebuild the mirror --- however, this would be quite system-intensive I think and I don't think I want to exert unnecessary CPU if I don't have to.

Any suggestions?

Also, since the drive is 500Gb, I was hoping to backup a G5 tower to a different partition of the drive in the exact same way.... and that raises another couple of questions--

Is it possible to plug 2 computers into the firewire drive at the SAME time??? It has 2 ports so I'm tempted to just plug both computers into it.. but I don't want it to explode on me. lol :-)


Also, if my MacBook Pro dies, will the clone of my system only backup another MacBook Pro or would it boot any Intel Mac??
Are there ways to create an image that will boot any mac?

Thanks for any advice anyone can offer. :-)

[djbeta]

bump

[bharoche]

I use Super Duper to clone my 500 GB iMac disk to a 500 GB My Book firewire disk. Actually, b/c I only have about 200 GB of data, I partition the My Book drive into two partitions and clone to one, leaving the other one free for whatever. I can then restore from the My Book cloned drive, or use it as the start up disk. Super Duper is super easy and can run automatically on a schedule. The My Book drive spins down after so many minutes of inactivity (and turns off essentially) so I actually don't have it set up for auto backups.

Super Duper says you can't restore the OS from an intel machine to a PPC machine. I'd imagine if you have two identical computers, you could restore the OS from one computer to the other. However, if they're not identical, meaning different drivers for the hardware, you're potentially looking at trouble.

That said, what you can do is clone one computer to an external drive, then do a fresh install on the second computer, then plug in the external drive to that computer and use Migration Assistant to copy user data and applications over - retaining all your preferences, disk and network settings. It's 95%+ equivalent of a complete restore along the lines of what you'd like. I've done this repeatedly between an iMac and a Powerbook.

You don't actually need an external drive. You could partition your internal HD and do all this, and then put the computer into Target Mode -- but if the computer has problems with its HD, logic board, power supply, etc. you may not be able to boot up the machine. Plus an external drive is portable.

Can you plug two separate computers into the same external drive? Probably depends on the drive. My Book has several ports but there either designed to be used alternatively, or to daisy chain multiple My Books. I don't think what you want to do will cause an explosion , but on a My Book at least I don't think it would work -- both machines would think they have "control" over the external drive and its partitions and you get into permissions issues, etc.

Hope this helps some.