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To be fair, iOS is a much more controlled environment, where all third-party software is heavily sandboxed and has no low level access to the filesystem, and users don't directly interact with the filesystem a la Finder. macOS isn't nearly so protected from third party stuff or user manipulation (and it shouldn't be), so there's more risk.

Apple has never been afraid to jump in with new technologies and quickly deprecate the old, so this move doesn't entirely surprise me. However, I'll be sticking with Mike Bombich's advice (a well-respected developer who knows a lot about Mac filesystems) and waiting a few point releases. Of course, I do this every time anyway, and I typically skip at least every other major version (still running El Capitan on all my Macs). While I'm sure millions of Mac users will never notice any problems, I'll let them be the guinea pigs and will eagerly read the problem reports that do come up to see if there's anything that would affect me.

The one problem (as with any solution here) is that 10TB is nearly impossible to back up.

That depends on whether all that data is changed or is only archived. For archiving 2 4TB external drives can be used to store most of the data with a 2TB drive used for data that is frequently changed. What is more problematic, because it takes action, is to transfer old data to new storage and test it.

Currently I've got a Mac and I use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup my internal HDD to external drives but I want to use Ubuntu as well and don't know how it will work with files backed up by CCC. CCC is supposed to do an exact copy but when I tested a backup once I noticed it didn't preserve all of the file metadata such as creation/modification dates and file attributes or permissions. There are 3 user accounts on my computer and each user was able to open files other users owned. Maybe I didn't use the right options when running CCC. So, will I be able to preserve the metadata and if so can Ubuntu work with it as well is something I'll have to find out. However I am able to make 1, 2, 3, or more backups some of which I can keep onsite while archives are kept off-site.

Falcon

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a MacBook Air for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Thinkpad T60 running Ubuntu, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

It took you more than 20 minutes to copy a 17MB, or was that Mb?, file? A couple of days ago to prepare to upgrade my MacBook Pro running Leopard to Snow Leopard, and install Ubuntu to dualboot, I cloned my Mac OSX disk to create a bootable external drive. How long did it take to clone 20GB? Not more than a couple of hours. When I actually do install Snow Leopard and Ubuntu, I'll first use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my user directory which takes up more than 100GB. I don't expect it to take as long as a day.

Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

Isn't your post the opposite, a flame against Macs? Faster? I don't have some thing modern to compare it to but I haven't used a computer faster than my MacBook Pro. Cheaper? Before buying my MBP I make a list of hardware requirements then went comparison shopping. The cheapest laptop I saw cost $150 less than a MacBook Pro, however every other one cost as much or more than the MBP. More stable? One of the reasons I switched was because of stability, I was sick and tired of my PCs constantly crashing and having to be repaired. Yes repaired. Of 4 new PCs I bought the harddisk drive and motherboard of 3 of them had to be replaced within a year. On the other hand I bought 2 used Macs which lasted me 8 and 7 years. The MacBook Pro I'm typing this on has had to be repaired twice in the 2 years I've had it. The score, of 4 PCs 6 repairs in one year, vs no repairs needed of 2 Macs in more than 7 years and 2 repairs on 1 Mac in 2 years.

Falcon

I work at an all-Mac school district, with my school having 300 Macs alone. We have 8 laptop carts with 30 MacBooks each, 2 computer labs with roughly 20 iMacs each, 1 laptop or workstation for each staff and faculty, and we're piloting a 1:1 laptop program with about 30 students enrolled in the program. Here is a list of what I use to get the job done:

1 Server with OS X Server (preferably 10.6.)
1 24 port gigabit switch
NetRestore (you don't need this if you have 10.6 Server.)
Apple Remote Desktop Software

It's straight forward, there are lots of very easy to follow guides online. You can pick this up even if you know nothing about Macs at all. Basically you set up your server for NetBoot. Your clients will boot off the server, then block copy an image to their HDD. You can do this via NetRestore Helper which makes a simple-to-use GUI, or, if you have 10.6 Server, all of NetRestore's functionality is now apart of 10.6's NetBoot utility. You can also do it via CLI.

You can use shell scripts to automate tasks. They can be set to run before the computer is imaged (partitioning the HDD, for example) or after it has been imaged (setting the sharing name, joining a domain, setting up printers, or installing additional software.)

Apple Remote Desktop will allow you remotely manage each computer. You can do asset management, updates, software installs, etc. Coupled with ARD Server on the Server itself, you can automate these tasks. Similar to Active Directory.

If your organization has invested in LANDesk and/or Altiris, both will take advantage of an OS X Server and streamline the process. You'll be able to do all the aforementioned via both LANDesk and Altiris; they basically just relay commands to the OS X Server. Both integrate the process pretty well. I don't know about Norton Ghost.

If you're using Multicast IP and have a gigabit switch, you can image batches of 20 computers (or more, depending on the switch) in 30 minute intervals. This varies depending on how big your images are, of course. Target Disk Mode via FireWire is a great way to image 1 off machines or to get data off failing hardware. Prep time for such a set up is about 2 hours (power, ethernet, setup, etc.)

Also, remember that's it's UNIX. You can do everything I just mentioned via command line if you're a keyboard junkie.

Here're some indispensable links to help you get started:

http://www.bombich.com/
http://www.macenterprise.org/
http://www.wazmac.com/

Keep in mind that the hardware is more expensive, but I've found the support to be a lot easier than Windows. Cost savings is in the support of the machines. There are also no client access license fees if bound to OS X Server directly instead of ActiveDirectory.

I worked at a school district for some time with a significant Mac deployment. We used Mike Bombich's software extensively, and especially for deployment, his NetBoot utility.

It does take a little bit of configuration on the server-side to start, but it looks like some other posters have already linked to tutorials for setting that up. MB has a utility to create a net-bootable-image that can used to image that machine with your choice of disk images (we had different images for different architectures, and different software packages), or can be automated to pick an image automatically.

His NetBoot software also has the ability to run a shell script to complete configuration settings that may need to be done on a per-machine basis (setting the computer network name for example).

For running updates, and modifying settings after the initial imaging, Apple's remote desktop is actually very useful. Although the feature set is limited, it DOES allow for the execution of shell commands from the Remote Desktop interface, which makes upgrading or changing settings on a large number of machines fairly easy.

For a (assumed) Christian, you sure LIE A LOT...

Carbon Copy Cloner. FREE. Been around for nearly a DECADE. Not only does it "Ghost" your drive ( GHOST IS NOT A FREE APP BTW!), but the backups can be BOOTABLE.

Don't blame Apple for your inability to do 5 seconds of research to find the solution.

And you can blame Disk Utility's inability to write to an NTFS drive on Microsoft (who REFUSES to document NTFS), not Apple!!! BTW, Disk Utility has PERFECT NTFS READ support. But you don't mention THAT, either (of course).

You call HFS+ "Proprietary", and then have the temerity to mention NTFS as if it's some sort of Open Standard?!?!? Hahahahahaha!!!!! Of course, if you were being honest (instead of just trolling), you'd admit that that limitation is neatly overcome by the (FREE!) MacFUSE userspace NTFS filesystem read/WRITE support.

And when Snow Leopard (Server, at least) debuts with FULL ZFS support...

And oh, BTW, if you had been running the DEAD-SIMPLE (And QUITE unique!!!) Time Machine, you wouldn't have had ANY of all this. And the price of Time Machine? Oh, that's right, it's INCLUDED IN THE OS!!!

So now WHO's the IDIOT again?

Thought so.

Huh? I think this is actually a clash of the slashdot zealots personally. There is always software for backing things up regardless if the software is closed source and the company doesn't include an official means.

Norton Ghost anyone (Windows)
CarbonCopyCloaner (Mac OS X)
iBackup (iPhone)

iTunes backs up your data anyway and a firmware flash will restore the system software. I seriously think the only point real of your post was that Android is open source and iPhone is not.

Beyond that, I highly recommend that anyone with a Mac buys *at least* an external hard drive and installs OSX on the hard drive. Unlike most operating systems, OSX will install easily onto an external hard drive, and once installed, you can boot any Mac from that hard drive. By that, I can plug a hard drive into my Macbook, hold down the "option" button while booting, and I'll be given the option of booting from the external hard drive. USB or Firewire, no problem. I can then take the same hard drive and do the same thing with an iMac or Mac Pro without worrying about the fact that it's different hardware. I don't have to load alternate drivers or anything.

What's more, if you put a copy of Carbon Copy Cloner on that hard drive (it's free), then you can use that hard drive to image systems with a couple clicks of the mouse. If your OS isn't working, you can boot from your external hard drive, back up your data, and then copy the complete system from the external hard drive to your internal hard drive, and then unplug the external hard drive and boot from the internal.

All of this is a relatively simple process and I could walk my mother through it over the phone.

I've been using the free Carbon Copy Cloner for a while to do bootable backups of my entire hard drive. Crude, but it works well and I currently don't really need other features. The only downside is that it can take forever to back up everything.

When I'm away from my backup harddrive, I do just as you say and drag and drop my most important files to my iPod.

Of course, once I upgrade to 10.5 I'll probably wonder how I've been living without Time Machine all this time. Plus ça change...

But you are willing to store a delicate HD in an unusable state (you either need an adapter, or a model compatible w/ the sled you pulled it from, or you need to remove the HD from the sled and place it in a removable HD case from which you've removed the HD). I do this, but I use older machines, all from the same manufacturer (Fujitsu) and there's a bit of compatibility between most models (a Point 1600 has the exact same case as a 510 &c.)

Your new HD will almost always have more than enough space to store the entire HD on a disk image and on a Mac, this is trivial to do:

  - boot up old machine in Firewire Target Disk Mode
  - connect w/ new machine using Firewire cable
  - check amount of data on old system using Finder on new system
  - make a disk image a bit larger than that
  - use a tool like Carbon Copy Cloner ( http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html ) to copy the old HD onto the disk image

Then do a complete backup --- you do back up right?

William

Bombich products work best for me.

Did you follow this tutorial?

http://www.bombich.com/mactips/dualboot.html/

I work in a K-12 Education district (primarily apples) and we have noticed a few quirks if you have been using non-intel apples and are changing to intel apples.
To start, you want to create a GUID Partition Table on your external drive. This will allow the drive to boot from an intel mac. The older "Apple Partition Map" will not boot from an Intel, so this is the foundation step.
Once you've got that ready, you will want to use Carbon Copy Cloner from Bombich to make your image(s) onto your external drive. I would second the earlier discussed notion of using parallels as it has worked well for both our tech savvy, and not so tech savvy employees. (Read: Parallels doesn't require a computer degree to use)
Install as small a copy of OSX as possible onto the external drive. This will allow you to boot from the external drive, run Carbon Copy Cloner or NetRestore (whichever poison suits you best) and then deploy the image(s). Having OSX bootable from the external drive will also enable you to make any partition changes you need on the mac's hard disk.

Standard imaging practices apply, run your updates, install any software you intend to have on every machine, and repair permissions on the disk before making your final image. Rum is optional, but highly recommended, as it can make the time spent waiting for the image to complete fly by.
-
Why is the rum gone?

The only way to do this is to copy the entire drive, bit for bit. If you clone each partition, you lose out on the wacky Apple GPT/MBR stuff, which means your copy of Windows will die. The guide on NetRestore seems adequate but highlights the complexity. It should be possible to copy a drive image for osx, windows, and then update the GPT and MBR manually to match it, though.

Partition the drives, run Ghost on the Windows portion, and Carbon Copy Cloner on the Mac portion.

http://www.bombich.com/mactips/dualboot.html

As long as you sysprep and reseal you should be able to use NetRestore to push out an NTFS image as well. You can't multicast the NTFS part, but you could could multicast the HFSJ volume and then unicast the NTFS volume with a post-flight script. Just make sure that you create the image from a Mac so that it has all the needed drivers.

ASR is best documented in its man page.

Bombich has done a great job in documenting NTFS deployment at: http://www.bombich.com/mactips/dualboot.html

Since BootCamp is beta, most places I know feel better rolling out Parallels. Dual boot is always a PITA anyway, IMHO, and this way you can roll everything out in one HFSJ image.

Every 10.4 Mac, both client and server, has a multicast image server on it. Check the man page for ASR.

Since you've found bombich.com for NetRestore you should also take a look at his nice article on multicast server rate tuning. http://www.bombich.com/mactips/multicast.html It covers how to setup multicast ASR properly. Also new versions of NetRestore can look for mDNS advertised multicast servers and automatically show them as restore options.

I very recently helped a customer setup a multicast ASR server and they were imaging Macs as fast as they could unbox them. As fast as they could get one of of the box, another was ready to come off the network and back into a box for deployment.

Typically I use multicast on an isolated network for mass imaging, and then maintain a unicast imaging server for the here and there re-imaging of a box.

If you want to not even bother with imaging, then Apple can work with you to setup a custom SKU to order that has your build on it out of the box. Ask your AE or SE about CSS to learn more.

ROFL. Further, try cloning 15 of the things in a classroom and try to get Safari to work full stop...

Maybe you should read up a bit on Mac solutions before you comment- software like Apple Remote Desktop, FileWave, NetOctopus, NetBoot/NetRestore, Radmind, HP OpenView, Deep Freeze and resources like AFP548, Mac Managers, MacOSX Labs, MacEnterprise, and of course Apple itself (I'll leave finding Apple's website as an exercise for the reader ;) make running large Macintosh installations fairly easy. There are plenty of UNIX/CLI tools and scripts out there, and Apple offers professional certifications if you want paper to show a potential employer.

The problem in your argument is the assumption that Apple does not have something that competes in all of those spaces. But Apple has actually had centralized management for much longer than it has been available for Windows, and it is generally an easier-to-administer system. And system imaging is much easier on the Mac side.

Now for the details:

For the AD/GPO side you have MacOS X Server's OpenDirectory and Workgroup Management. The later product stared out in the MacOS 7 days as "Macintosh Manager" and was available as part of AppleShare IP product. You can do an awful lot of locking down on the computer with the point-and-click components, including setting the users to use network home directories (pretty much the same avrients as are available on Windows). A good begining point for this would be Apple's page on MacOS X Server: http://www.apple.com/server/desktop_management.htm l

For imaging you have a number of choices: You can make up a computer as you would like it imaged, then use the free imaging tools that are included with the OS (Disk Utility has absorbed this capability, it used to be part of ASR). Then you can either push it back onto the computer using Disk Utility again, or use the image to NetBoot computers from a MacOS X Server (technically you don't need server, but it makes it easier), use the free NetBoot/NetRestore system to allow you to cause network-based imaging to happen, use the free tool Radmind to keep the image in sync (complex settings possible, and you can update one computer then let the rest follow it automatically), or use any of the other techniques that are out there (LANRev, NetOctopus, etc).

Oh... and an image you make of one computer will boot all computers that that OS supports (computers much older, or newer than the OS won't work), there are a few tricks and traps to that, but not many that matter. And there is currently the caveat that you need 2 images: one for PPC and one for Intel.

And on the remote software install party, Apple Remote Desktop does this wonderfully. It even allows for broadcast installing and leaving a package on a server so that disconnected users will get it the next time they connect.

Oh, and then you can also use AD servers to do all of this management if you would like, either through schema modification or adding a MacOS X Server on the side.

I'm no expert, but I can point you to a couple of interesting web pages by people who do seem to know a lot of the details:

• Mac Backup Software Harmful and the earlier The State of Backup and Cloning Tools under Mac OS X at plasticsfuture
• MacOS X Backups at Seth's Unix Tips

You also need to think about what your backups are for and how much time and money you're prepared to expend: for some, burning a few personal files to CDR every few months will suffice, whereas for others an external HD holding a complete clone is the thing, and power users may need daily or weekly incremental backups with the ability to retrieve any file going back years.

Personally speaking, I'm in the middle category, with a large external Firewire HD holding a clone of each of my drives, which I redo every month or so. (Having it bootable is also a good idea, and has saved my bacon at least once!) I've mostly been using Carbon Copy Cloner, which has given good results, but I've recently switched to SuperDuper! which is cheap and seems to preserve absolutely everything. But don't take my word for it: read the linked pages, work out your needs, and make up your own mind.

But DO think about it! Disaster WILL strike in some form or other; disks DO fail (as I know to my cost), and you need to plan for it. It's not a question of how much time or money you can afford to spend; it's a question of how much data you can afford to lose!

In particular, SuperDuper! preserves all metadata, while CCC misses BSD flags, creation date, HFS+ extended attributes, the locked flag, and ACLs. It also knows about Spotlight. The free version works fine, but you can also pay to add scheduling, incremental backups, etc.

(Disclaimer: I've no connection other than as a user who's just moved from CCC to SD!.)

I hope they continue to support Target Disk Mode via Firewire 800, and even if they had a similar way of doing the same thing with USB would be nice - that feature has saved my ass an innumerable amount of times. It makes for a nice troubleshooting option and makes things like Carbon Copy Cloner possible... glad to hear that Apple is not sending FireWire the way of the floppy disk just yet.

"A lot of" Terminal commands may have been an overstatement. Must have been me remembering my nervousness as I did each step, as I was worried about having to redo everything if I messed up. Four commands.
http://www.bombich.com/mactips/homedir.html

Also, the MacAddict How To article was December 2004, but it seems that they had a shorter bit in the Ask Us section in January 2004.

There's a way to prevent this. Basically you make a small program which registers the "quit application" event and when the program receives that event you send back a "user canceled" error result to the system. This cancels the reboot and keeps your program running.

Once you are done you just end the program and the user can reboot as normal.

There some info on the technique here:
How do I disable Command-Control-Eject (normal reboot)?

A better plan might be to do the software update as a logout hook. That way the update can be configured to occur when the user logs out and it won't interrupt their work. You can read more about login and logout hooks here.

Here are some official Apple articles on the matter:
The Boot Process (includes everything from boot to shutdown)
Customizing Login and Logout

/usr/sbin/softwareupdate

Carbon Copy Cloner is also another good Mac OS X backup utility that can make a bootable, mountable disk image or directly bootable copy of a partition.

Highly recommended.

(I am not affliliated with CCC, just a happy user)

Carbon Copy Cloner. So popular that even Apple Stores use it to ghost their machines regularly.

I think that must be the same deal for Mike Bombich, who wrote some very nifty software (as donationware) before he was hired by Apple. I used to hang out on a forum where he and his wife frequented, and he was always helpful and friendly to others. Nice guy as well as a great mac geek. I remember how excited they were when Mike got hired by Apple. It was a dream come true. Hell, I think the entire forum was tickled that one of our own was going to join the mother ship.

I have a mostly linux-centric background - where going to Google is the best way to answer a problem. When I first started working with Macs, it took me a long time to realize that Apple actually has a very good support site. There are a few exceptions where you can get better support information elsewhere (macosxhints, bombich), but overall, the information on the Apple site is great.

It took me even longer to realize that AppleCare is worth having and that calling Apple on the phone will will get your problem fixed. When people ask me for help with a Mac problem I always ask if the computer is still supported, if it is, I just tell them to call Apple. Strange to say, but most of the time they will probably get the same level of support from Apple that they would get from me, and it is a lot cheaper than my going rate.

http://www.bombich.com/software/index.html

cheers
G

I take care of about 500 macs (~450 laptop, ~50 desktop). We stick mainly with Apple's Imaging Services (especially with Mike Bombich's frontends) to install fresh machines.

I agree with other posters that just about any hard drive will do in this situation, especially given that everyone has an axe to grind about a particular manufacturer. FWIW, we've been having good luck with the LaCie drives of late (triple interface USB2/FW400/FW800), and they come in a variety of sizes, form factors, and speeds. We've had mixed results with Maxtor drives; the older revision all died with the click of death, though the newer ones are still going strong.

For on-the-go repairs, I like the bus-powered 2 1/2" drives. They're easy to carry, and don't require a power brick to go with them. Yeah, they're only 5400 RPM, but that's plenty fine for us. If you used compressed disk images and ASR (or Mike Bombich's NetRestore frontend), you get even better throughput since the computer will decompress on the fly. In this case, portability may be better than the increased spindle speed.

Also, if money really is no object, look into getting yourself a NetBoot server. If you do that, you don't even need a drive at all! Just hold down the "n" key on boot, and the machine will netboot to your restore image. From there, you can nuke & pave with the click of a button, and get back to doing real work (the machine will reboot itself when done). We use one here to image our lab machines, desktops, and laptops, and it really works great. Huge time-saver at the beginning of the year when we get new equipment. Obviously, this requires a decent core network if you don't want to slag the entire LAN, but if you've got a decent switched network this can work very well.

I take care of about 500 macs (~450 laptop, ~50 desktop). We stick mainly with Apple's Imaging Services (especially with Mike Bombich's frontends) to install fresh machines.

I agree with other posters that just about any hard drive will do in this situation, especially given that everyone has an axe to grind about a particular manufacturer. FWIW, we've been having good luck with the LaCie drives of late (triple interface USB2/FW400/FW800), and they come in a variety of sizes, form factors, and speeds. We've had mixed results with Maxtor drives; the older revision all died with the click of death, though the newer ones are still going strong.

For on-the-go repairs, I like the bus-powered 2 1/2" drives. They're easy to carry, and don't require a power brick to go with them. Yeah, they're only 5400 RPM, but that's plenty fine for us. If you used compressed disk images and ASR (or Mike Bombich's NetRestore frontend), you get even better throughput since the computer will decompress on the fly. In this case, portability may be better than the increased spindle speed.

Also, if money really is no object, look into getting yourself a NetBoot server. If you do that, you don't even need a drive at all! Just hold down the "n" key on boot, and the machine will netboot to your restore image. From there, you can nuke & pave with the click of a button, and get back to doing real work (the machine will reboot itself when done). We use one here to image our lab machines, desktops, and laptops, and it really works great. Huge time-saver at the beginning of the year when we get new equipment. Obviously, this requires a decent core network if you don't want to slag the entire LAN, but if you've got a decent switched network this can work very well.

I tend to not do clean installs of the OS. I find that installing over my ol system works very well with a minimum of fuss because I keep all of my prefs, my password keychain and so on. What I do that gives me a fall-back position is to use Mike Bombich's excellent Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my last known good OS to another disk. It will make that disk bootable in case of an emergency or a bad upgreade.

I should mention that Web Objects used to sell for thousands of dollars. That Apple is giving it away now shows an incredible commitment to developers.

Sorry for the late reply, but it's been busy here.

Open Directory has provisions via the Workgroup Manager settings from Mac OS X Server to completely manage clients. In conjunction with Apple Remote Desktop and NetBoot it gives you the ability to manage almost anything on a client machine.

There are also third-party packages that can help with this process, such as NetRestore and Radmind.

Some URLs:

http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/workgr oupmanagement.html
http://www.bombich.com/
http://eq.rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/radmind/

--Paul

Here it is: http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html CCC

I've even upgraded to bigger drives without having to do a full install. Carbon Copy Cloner will quite happily copy your boot disk to another drive that you can have sitting, say, temporarily in an external USB or FW enclosure. When it's done, you power off, replace the boot drive with the new one and you're done.

Or just use Carbon Copy Cloner. Free, easy, works great.

Carbon Copy Cloner will clone an OS X installation from one machine to another.

It works Mac to Mac, across a Fireware cable. I've used it on everything from Clamshell iBooks to G3 iMacs to 1.25Ghz G4 PowerBooks, from 10.2.x to 10.3.8 - no problems at all.

Unless you format the destination drive it's sorta hit or miss, but they clearly point this out.

So yes, it's *technically* possible. Legal? Other folks have already posted about that aspect.

Sorry to reply to my own post, but after watching the video, it seems there would be at least two advantages over Knoppix:

1. A USB Flash drive/MP3 player is somthing you might be carrying anyway.

2. It looks as if you can mirror your internal drive to the USB device as a precautionary measure and then boot off the USB drive when the interal one fails. I do this with my iBook and iPod using CCC or SuperDuper!

Of course, your laptop must support booting from USB/Firewire as well.

Why not use Carbon Copy Cloner from Bombich software instead of the official OS X installer? I'm surprised no one's suggested this (from what i've seen).

I'm still trying to find the right combination for backup/restore on OSX.

First off, I don't do the default OSX install. I always slice up the partition (not partition the drive, this is a *bsd type OS people! :P) as described in this article that I wrote for MacOSXHints a couple of years ago.

Then on a semi-regular basis, I will (should rather) clone everything save /Users using
Carbon Copy Cloner. This would be applicable to other *nix's of making a bootable clone minus /home. Ghost for Unix perhaps?

Then all that's left to do is an incremental backup of /Users. I've thought about modifying this to include an incremental on /sw, and /usr/local, but that's being complicated. If worst came to worst, I could recompile any customizations I've done, it would just take a while.

Now, for those Mac users that know their stuff:

CCC will clone nicely to another disk. I've tried cloning to a disk image when everything minus /Users came out to be ~3GB. It takes FOREVER to complete on an external firewire drive.

WTF? Is this an issue that has been resolved in the last year? I haven't even bothered trying, but knowing that 10.4 is around the corner, and I haven't done a decent OS backup in a while bothers me. I backup /Users to DVD every once in a while, and I have an external firewire drive full of MP3's that I do optical backups of from time to time and mail them off to my brother in law in LA (I'm in St. Louis). Any better suggestions on getting a bootable OS image that is easily restored? Possible something I can dump to a DVD and mail off as I'm doing now?

Mike Bombich is not an "enthusiast", he is an Apple Employee and his tools NetRestore and Carbon Copy Cloner form the basis for Apple's new Setup Assistant and network imaging tools. I have his Apple business card on my desk as I type.

I've always thought that Linux evangelists should advocate the Windows user to buy Macs. If users who switch at all wanted to learn *nix, they could always crack open the terminal application and learn a few commandline commands and shell scripting techniques to make their Mac experience all the more useful and efficient. Then after they become more adept at *nix in general, the migration to Linux is easy (that is, if they want to give up the niceties of Mac OS X :). For example, how many of us Windows users wanted to be able to send email without the need to setup SMTP settings in Outlook or Netscape mail -- thus avoiding the terrible restrictions our ISPs have on email transport? Mac users have it easy, they can easily enable sendmail in their systems, since sendmail is packaged but inactive in the standard Mac OS X system.

I use Carbon Copy Cloner on my PowerBook to mirror my entire hard drive to an external 60 GB USB 2.0 hard drive. CCC is supposed to make external drives bootable as well, but I've had trouble getting it to do that.

It's not the ideal solution, since it obviously means that if any data on my PowerBook's HD gets corrupted, I'll just be cloning over that corruption. I'm probably going to start doing separate backups to CD-R and/or CD-RW to ensure additional data integrity. But I do like the simplicity of having a complete mirror of my PowerBook's HD on another HD if the drive in my PowerBook should ever fail -- restoration will be that much easier.

On windows, I've been more of a "right-click, copy, right-click, paste" sort of guy, whereas, on the mac, with no right click, I go for the command-c, command-v stuff.

I know, it sounds trivial, but there are a lot of useful key-combos on a mac. For all the complaints of a one-button mouse, I find with the key-combos, the lack of extra buttons doesn't slow me down. In fact, one benefit is that the key-combos are much more consistant in OS X than windows. Command-Q always quits. Always. Every program. Command-S always saves. Windows has this sort of thing, but there are quite a bit of programs that don't cohere to the convention in Windows.

Otherwise, this is the advice I can think to muster (yes, I'm thread-hijacking):

• OS X and Windows have a lot of the same applications. MS Office, Macromedia/Adobe suites, stuff like that. So, if you used these apps, get the OSX version of the same apps, and you'll feel at home. In many cases, there's little difference.
• Watch out for resource forks. If you aren't familiar with resource forks, it's some extra metadata that tells the OS what kind of file it is and how to deal with it. If you want to use unix commands, be careful when moving, copying, or compressing files, because you can lose the resource fork, which makes the file useless unless you can repair the resource fork. It's a pain. There are ways around this, but you may have to do some research and experiment (Helios Xtar comes to mind for tar).
• Some good sites for technical info: Mike's Mac OS X...Tips (home of Carbon Copy Cloner) and mac OS X hints (really helpful)
• A lot of things are similar. When you'd normally go looking for Winzip, use Stuffit. When looking for Firefox, adjust, and realize you want Camino. Explorer and Finder work similarly. If you're looking for Outlook, the Mail, Addressbook, iCal combo will probably meet your needs. The Control Panel in Windows is "System Preferences". It's not going to be hard to figure out, and the Mac alternatives are usually going to be at least as good as Windows.
• The dock may take some getting used to. Closing a window does not mean you've exited the application. If you want to know if an application is running, look at the dock. If the icon for the application has a little black triangle underneath it, it's running. To quit an application, make sure you have it running as the top-most application (it's name will be on the top bar, right next to the Apple icon) and press command-Q. (there are a couple of other ways to do this, but like I said, get used to keyboard shortcuts)
• Don't spend very long trying to quit out of that little blue smiley face at the end of your dock. That's the finder. It's always running.
• The "command" key is the one that has an apple on it (next to "alt" and the spacebar).
• When you look in menus for keyboard shortcuts, you'll see funny symbols. What I mean is, if you click on "File", one of the options will be "Save" and next to "Save" will be a funny clover-leaf symbol, and then an "S". This means "command S"The little clover-leaf is the command key. (usually, the command key has both a clover-leaf-looking symbol and the Apple logo on the keyboard, so this one shouldn't be too hard). An up arrow isn't up, it's shift. The third symbol, which I can't even figure out how to explain what it looks like, that means "alt".
• All data goes in your home folder. Your program preferences are in the Library folder, which goes in your home folder. It's kinda unix-like, easy to deal with, a lot better than Windows.
• In fact, as a user, you can pretty much ignore the Library and System Fold

These are all the free (as in beer) applications I use all the time:

WireTap: Save an audio file of any sound being played on the Mac by any other application.

DVDBackup: Great for backing up DVDs (while removing region coding, CSS encryption, and Macrovision encryption.) You'll still need Toast to burn the DVDs though.

PixelNhance: A must-have to tinker with the color/brightness/contrast etc. of your digital pictures.

Pixen: The best pixel-level editor on any platform.

MorphX: Morphs one image into another.

SnapNDrag: For screen captures (Grab is another basic screen capture utility that comes bundled with OSX).

Galerie: Puts your photos in a nice album-type gallery of web pages for being served by a web server.

LaTex Equation Editor and Tex Fog: The equation editors I use. Requires Tex/LaTex to be installed..

And if you are into LaTex, you'll also want CPlot: A parametric equation plotter.

CyberDuck: Open source S/FTP client. (Other FTP clients for OSX include osXigen, Transmit, Fetch, Fugu...).

Onyx: A must-have system utility.

MenuMeter: Another must-have system info utility. Excellent.

Books: A library software (book database).

Xnippets: A decent information organiser.

Carbon Copy Cloner: Backup software. (Donationware)

A few apps I have gladly paid money to use:

ChartSmith: Wonderfull for making all kinds of charts you have ever thought of (and some you haven't).

EvoCAM: Great app to record/play (or otherwise control) a Firewire/USB camera hooked to your Mac. Well worth the shareware price. (Also checkout their other offerings - ImageDV and VideoScope)

Intaglio: The 2D vector drawing/CAD program of my choice for simple CAD/ technical drawings.

Keynote: A (much better than) PowerPoint replacement from Apple. I use this all the time. (When it came out originally, I paid $$ for it; I heard Apple is bundling it with iLife now?)

Little Snitch: Keeps tabs on any stealth connections being made to/from your Mac, Shareware.

Intuem: Nice MIDI app with a clean interface. (GarageBand, one of Apple's iLife apps, is great for Audio/MIDI as well, but I find it limiting for my purpose because it does not do MIDI-out to my keyboard/synth.)

cheers- raga

I agree. For many years radmind was the only robust solution for OS X. It is by far the most widely used for this task. Though radmind is slow. It will take 2-8 hours to update your computers from scratch. However, why does it matter? Plus radmind will allow you to push incremental upgrades in as little as two minutes. It's somewhat difficult to learn, but the radmind user list is really really great. Most of the people on the list run big university labs or corporate labs and I find them to be really smart and creative. Check it out: http://www.radmind.org/

Thoug I have to say sometimes radmind sucks, like if you go from Jaguar to Panther it can break. Though generally for minor system updates and security fixes it's okay. This is why you TEST! And if you need a full restore you use apple software restore or netrestore from Mike Bombich. I like that guy: http://www.bombich.com/ But then you need an Mac OS X Server http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/ as I recall, in which case, you might as well by an xserve http://www.apple.com/xserve/ since it comes with the software. But again you will only need Bombich once a year; so you can just visit every machine with a cd ad it might be as effective as all the ASR which I found to be difficult to implement. We had to get an Apple Engineer to set it up for us. heh.

Problem is there's no network install, only local disks. (Hence the subject line...)

I'm the systems administrator for a university library. To provide computing for our patrons we use a mixture of Dells running Windows 2000, iMacs with OS X, and Linux machines running LTSP.

Windows can be made very secure, but it takes a lot of time to learn how to set it up properly. Over time i've accumulated lots of small utilities to aid in the task, as well as written several scripts of my own. Besides locking the system down as much as possible, i have a script that runs weekly which uses Norton Ghost to re-image the hard drive.

Macs can also be made very secure. Again, over time i've written scripts to do much of the work on new installs. Here's some URLs to get you started: macosxlabs macosxhints bombich Finally, there is Linux. These are my favorite machines because the administration time required is almost 0. We are running Linux Terminal Server Project with hardware purchased from DisklessWorkstations.com. The machines do not have write access to the server that they boot from, so nothing can get screwed up. If anything happens to a machine, we just have to reset it and a minute later it is back to normal. Setting up the first terminal took some work because i was not familiar with network booting or running an operating system from read-only media (a read-only nfs share in this case), but once the first one is set up, adding additional units is trivial. In our setup the applications actually run on the diskless station, but it is more common to run applications on the server and have them display on the diskless station. If you wanted to go that route, you'd want to spend some money on a nice server, but it should work well. I've actually been thinking of buying a better server and trying to run applications on it and eventually trying to move all computing to Linux.