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Backing up your whole Hard Drive

Making a bootable clone of your entire Hard drive is easy with backuplist. Rsync or psync copy method is required. You will also need a fire wire drive to make a bootable copy on. Note: Some people seem to have trouble creating a bootable copy. If you can not get the backup system to boot (see below) you may have to quit the startup process (disconnect drive if necessary) and restart from your hard drive. You should use carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper if backuplist fails in this respect.

To create a bootable copy of your Macintosh Hard drive;

  1. It is a good idea to repair permissions on your own Hard Drive (Use Disk utility > repair permissions)
  2. Select rsync or psync from the copy methods popup in the settings panel. If you select psync, you wil be asked if you want backuplist+ to install it for you (necessary) and then follow the instructions. I like psync better than rsync for clones, it is faster and preserves the creation dates of files. If installation does not work, email me for instructions on manual installation.
  3. Be sure the destination Drive has "Ignore Ownership on this volume" unchecked! Click on the external Hard Drive icon and select "Get Info" from File Menu. At bottom of window see "Ignore Ownership on this volume" checkbox and leave it unchecked.
  4. Add your Macintosh Hard drive to backuplist list window
  5. Press the calculate sizes button.
  6. Select your Hard drive in the list window
  7. Erase the destination disk or partition - "a clean slate" is best! Be sure it is Mac HFS standard (Journaled if you want that).
  8. Select your destination disk (must be a fire wire drive) in destination popup.
  9. Press "Backup"
  10. Backuplist will copy the Hard drive contents to the destination disk. This could take from 30 minutes to several hours depending on size. My 24GB Drive takes 90 minutes. At the end it will bless the new system folder so you can start up (boot) from the external disk.
  11. To "Boot" from the new backup, go to System Preferences > Startup Disk and select the appropriate one and click "restart". Always check to see if the backup works and is truly a startup disk - otherwise it is useless if there is crash and you need to restore from there.
  12. Note: You can exclude items from the backup using the System clone exclude list. Go to the File menu > System clone exclude list. See more on this list....

See also

Other user preferences

Creating backup sets

Choosing a backup folder

Choosing a backup destination