WPR Mac Help

There are times when it would be nice/helpful/necessary to have an exact duplicate of our entire computer. Perhaps we’re going to get a new hard drive, or we’re about to do a major upgrade, and we’d like a little insurance policy if things go wrong. If you’re sending your machine in for repair, it’s always a good idea to have a backup.

In this article, I’ll show you how to make the most complete backup possible. It’s called making a “disk image” of your hard drive. We’ll basically be taking an X-ray of your Mac and tucking it away for safe keeping. It’s what I use as a just-in-case plan whenever I do any kind of major surgery on a machine. As Murphy’s law goes, if you have it, you won’t need it.

What we’re going to be doing is called making a “disk image” of our hard drive. Basically, we’re going to get absolutely everything that’s on the disk. In the worst case scenario, we’ll be able to take this disk image, push it back onto our hard drive, and be back exactly to where we were when we made the image.

It’s a long process, so it’s not really a good strategy for doing daily or even weekly backups. For that, you’d want something that’s able to do faster, more convenient backups. I hope to discuss regular backup plans in more detail later. This is more the “special occasion” or once-in-a-while uber-backup.

Things you’ll need:

• A place to put your backup (an external hard drive is great for this)
• Some time to let things sit and work

External hard drives, out of the box, are probably not set up to handle files as big as we’re about to make. You might need to reformat it.

1. Prepare your Mac

The first thing we’ll need to do is get your Mac into the shape you want. Basically, I suggest you do some simple things like throw away things you really know are junk then empty your Trash, empty your Cache files, then restart your Mac. Once it’s restarted, don’t open any applications you don’t have to. We want to keep things nice and quiet.

2. Check your drive space.

My dad used to say you can’t put 10 pounds of potatoes in a 5 pound bag. OK, so he didn’t really say “potatoes”, but you get the point. We need to make sure that all of your stuff will fit in the space you want to put it.

Look for the icon of your hard drive on your desktop. It’s usually in the upper RH corner. You can also use the Finder’s “Go” menu, choosing “Computer”. You should see your hard drive there too.

Click once on the hard drive so it’s highlighted. Then go under the “File” menu and choose “Get Info”. You should get a box that looks something like this:

Hint: Click on the image for a larger view.

Wow! I have a lot of stuff! Looking at this, I’ve got 99.98 Gigabytes of stuff on my drive, and only 11.24 GB of empty space. Now do the same operation, but with your external drive. Take a look at the “Available” space on that drive, and make sure that you’ve got enough room. For good measure, you’ll probably want to have a hair more room than you’ll actually need.

3. Copy your data

Apple includes a very handy little application called “Disk Utility” that hangs out in the Utilities folder (in your Applications folder). Go ahead and fire that up. I’m using the version that came with 10.4 here. The 10.3 is slightly different, but you should be able to follow along. (Some of the menu items got rearranged. You might have to hunt around a bit to find things.)

In Disk Utility, go under the “File” menu (10.3 users: I think you’ll find it under the “Images” menu), and choose “New”–> “Disk image from folder”. The program says, “Ok, that’s fine. Just which folder did you want to use to make this disk image?” Ok, it really doesn’t say that. It shows you the open/save dialog box so you can tell it which folder you have in mind.

As you can probably guess, we can make an image of any particular folder we want. In this case, we’ll want to use the main folder that has everything in it. Those of us who are geeks would call this the “root” of the file system. Which folder is this? It’s actually the icon that represents your hard drive. In my case, that’s the “Macintosh HD” and I have it selected.

Don’t click on anything inside of the hard drive, or you’ll only get that one folder. You want your hard drive icon to be the one that’s lit up in color. Above, you can see that mine is highlighted in blue, but none of the folders inside of it are highlighted. This means I’m going to get my “root” folder, and everything inside of it, which is everything on my computer.

Now your attention is probably drawn to that big blue button that says “Image”. And you’d be exactly right to press it. Now we’re immediately presented with a box that looks almost the same.

In this case, it’s asking us where we want to save the disk image we’re making and what we want to call it. By default, it will be called “/” which is the name of that “root” folder we talked about earlier. I usually give it a more descriptive name, like “Joe’s HD 06.20.2007″ or something like that.

Here’s the important part. Make sure you save this image to your external drive. Do NOT save it on the same drive that you’re trying to make an image of. You’ll end up with a loop that will go on forever, or until your main hard drive is full.

In my case, I’m putting it on my external firewire hard drive. The astute reader may notice that this disk wasn’t there on the first couple of screen shots. Yup, I forgot to plug it in before I started writing this. Don’t let that throw ya!

There are a couple of options that you get to pick from at the bottom of the window that just opened, “Image Format” and “Encryption”. For basic backup purposed, both of these are fine using the defaults of “Compressed” and “none” respectively. If you’re worried about where you backup may go when you’re not around, (or if you have some super secret stuff that would be bad if it ever got out) choosing “AES 128″ from the encryption menu isn’t a bad idea.

Now the moment of truth. Click that “Save” button. It will ask you to for your password, just to make sure that you’re really important enough to copy all the files on the computer.

When you click the “OK” button, the long process will begin. And, uh, it’s a long process. Depending on how full your hard drive is, it will probably take a couple of hours. I’d go take the dog for a walk and have some food. But then, dogs and food are two of my favorite things.

When it’s done, you’ll have a message that hopefully says it completed successfully.

4. Prepare it for fast restore

There’s one more step before we’re really done with making the backup. And it’s another long one, but it’s an optional one. We want to take this disk image and prepare it for restore. Trust me, if your in a position where you need this, you’ll be happy you did it.

Again, in Disk Utility, go under the “Images” menu and choose “Scan image for restore”. It will open up a box, asking you to point it to the image you’d like scanned. Point it to the image you just created and click on that big blue “Scan” button.

It will again as you for your password. After you’ve entered that in, you’ll get another dialog box that just has that spinning barber pole for a long, long time–about as much time as it took to make the disk image in the first place. When you’re done, you should get a message that says the image was scanned successfully.

NOW you’re done making your disk image.

5. Test it!

This is all well and good, but I’m a bit of a control freak, so I like to see with my own eyes that things worked before I get too far along. In the Finder, go find that disk image you created. Double click on it and in a few seconds, it should show up or “mount” on your desktop as though it were a CD-ROM. You’ll be able to click through all the folders and make sure everything is there that you think should be. (That should be everything on your disk.)

One “feature” of the backup we just made is that it is read-only. That means that, short of throwing the whole thing away, you cannot damage it, delete parts of it, or overwrite something. It’s set in stone as of the date you created it.

Hopefully that was pretty easy. Time consuming, but easy. The next thing to talk about is how we can use that disk image if we need it. But this was a pretty long post, so I’m going to talk about that later.