SuperDuper

Regarding backing up your system first...if you want to do that, you can use Carbon Copy Cloner, or SuperDuper, or some similar backup software, to make a clone of your current drive, if you have an external FireWire drive. If you find that something goes terribly wrong during the install, which it should not, you can always restore back to the original.

Hello Forum: I am running a Power PC Mac with OS X 10.4.6 Tiger, multiple user accounts (one admin, and daily accounts) and File Vault on my admin account. I am trying to compile Ruby on Rails from source, using the Hivelogic.com tutorial, but every time I get to the command sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies, it gives me the error: sudo: gem: command not...

900 MB remaining may seem as a lot of storage space; however, if MacOS X attempts to create one or more 'swapfiles' (in the '/var/vm/' folder) - the 900 MB of space could vanish quickly. MacOS X is nothing like 'System 9' and earlier. Particularly when one is copying files and / or folders; - especially, 'System' related files, or files and / or folders of users. There...

Both CCC and SuperDuper work well. ...

but I keep on seeing people mention Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper at the same time as if they are equally good. ...

You can boot from either drive with no problems. You can use either of these programs to clone your main drive to the new one; SuperDuper http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html Carbon Copy Cloner http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

It happened again...this time while I was attempting to do a "just in case" backup with SuperDuper. Also the machine was sitting, powered on, for about twenty minutes, and got pretty hot (hotter than I have ever noticed before), because I was a moron and left the room while the backup was running (and when the kernel panic happened). I've rebooted and am going to try to do a...

I use superduper to backup. ...

That's logging in with the login items disabled, so that they don't start up. I do that when I run a backup, sometimes, especially when I need to make the first backup of a drive, to ensure that nothing changes while the backup is running. I spoke with the SuperDuper developer (a similar product for making clones of a drive), and they said that it's not really necessary, so...

You can also "clone" your internal boot drive to the external drive, making a perfectly bootable, perfect copy of the drive, using Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper -- both found with a simple search at versiontracker.com. You can't simply copy folders over like you could in OS 9 -- due to the Unix permissions, you need root privileges plus you need to set certain privileges...