Backup to an external drive

[daleslad]

I want to be able to boot from my external drive but I am running into difficulty getting it set up right.
I have an intel MacPro running 10.4.11
I have a 500GB LaCie d2 HD QUADRA external firewire drive.
It came loaded with Retrospect Express which I am not very happy with.

I understand that the hard drive has to be formatted Mac OS Extended Journaled and the Partition Scheme has to be GUID.

My MacPro is partitioned for both Mac OS and Windows XP using Boot Camp.
When I first tried to back up my hard drive using Retrospect I backed up the Mac partition first and then tried to back up the Windows XP partition next.
When I tried this the Windows XP volume erased the Mac OS volume on the external hard drive.
I found the only way I could backup both volumes was to make 2 folders in Retrospect and backup the Mac into one and the Windows into the other one.
With this setup I couldn't boot from my hard drive. I contacted Retrospect but they weren't much help .. LaCie couldn't give me any help either except to say that I couldn't boot from there hard drive.
I feel that I should be able to boot from the hard drive with the right software but I've hit a brick wall.
I'm thinking about trying some other backup software like Super Duper but didn't want to start a long tedious process if erasing etc. until I got a second opinion on whether it's the right way to go.

[jbarley]

Carbon Copy Cloner which is free, or
SuperDuper which is not,
either will do a bang up job of cloning your OS X system, and it will be bootable.
Keep in mind that cloning to another drive takes over the whole drive or partition, so this action will delete any existing data on the target drive or partition.
SuperDuper is my personal favorite, the almost instant replies to emails for assistance make the token payment well worth it.

Retrospect, yuk! the fact that they are trying to give it away should say something.

jb.