I’ve used Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper to create backups of drives, but only recently had the need to restore my OS from such a backup. My first attempt at restoring from my SuperDuper clone (I didn’t have a recent one via Carbon Copy, so I can’t compare the two in this regard) didn’t go so well. All the files were restored, but the OS wouldn’t boot. I tried reinstalling the boot loader but no dice.

Then I did a clean install of OSX and started restoring from my Time Machine backup and was facing several long tasks of upgrades to get back to 10.5.5 (TimeMachine doesn’t restore kernals - just drivers, software, and user data / settings). I decided to give my SuperDuper clone one more time.

After booting into the DVD install disk I went into disk utility and mounted my SuperDuper sparse image backup. This contained the actual clone inside it as another mountable drive. I dragged this into the source and my OS drive into the destination and it took about an hour and a half (to restore about 80GB of data). Then I ran the repair permissions function while still in dist utility. Finally, I used bootefi to add my boot loader back to the drive and then crossed my fingers. What-do-ya-know. It totally worked.

One thing I like about SuperDuper is its ability to do a partial backup to an image, updating only the things that have changed. The first backup of my OS drive took nearly 15 hours (!!!), but subsequent updates take more like 10 minutes.

The only thing I’ll say about it is that the free version doesn’t allow you to do this partial restore nor does it allow you to schedule things.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 9:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.