Clone My Mac

[dune73]

Heya everyone, gonna be honest and say im a newly turned mac user, though not completely, i dont think ill ever 100% pick a side in this little war lol !

But with this in mind iv got a problem, i need to create 'what in windows' would be called 'imaging my OS Drive' unfortunately in the wonderful GUI world of MAC in having a little problem figuring out how to achieve this with my MAC OS X partition, iv come across 'Carbon Copy Cloner' but this will not recognize my external USB HDD as a drive to which it can actually image anything too.

Could someone please point me in the direction on how to successfully back up the entire contents of my MAC HD in a way which can be restored after iv finished playing around with it !

--
P.S please forgive my ignorance in MAC ways, im a newby to all this single click world !

[borbosha]

There is a tool under the Application > Utilities folder on your hard drive called Disk Utility that can make a DMG file (disk image) from any mounted volumes including your main system drive. To image your system drive you will need to use your OS X install disk to boot up then choose, from the utilities menu, the disk utility program. From there you can then make a clone of your current system.

Hope that helps.

[dune73]

I tried that, but got some wierd error message after about 10 mins saying the image was too large or summut like that !

[borbosha]

Hmm, that is odd. It is possible that you do not have enough space on the drive you are putting the file on. I am not 100% sure but it might make an image of the drive including the free space.

[dune73]

ouch, if thats the case ill have to check the drive (but im pretty sure its only 80GB and my mac HDD is 120 !)

Kinda shit if it does that, iv come to expect better from mac magic ! sorry to say but theres loads of windows apps out there that can happily image my main PC's 500GB hard disk into a 7GB Image file lol !

Sorry Steve, Bill wins this round !

[borbosha]

ouch, if thats the case ill have to check the drive (but im pretty sure its only 80GB and my mac HDD is 120 !)

Kinda shit if it does that, iv come to expect better from mac magic ! sorry to say but theres loads of windows apps out there that can happily image my main PC's 500GB hard disk into a 7GB Image file lol !

Sorry Steve, Bill wins this round !

It's not so much that Windows is better at imaging, because it is 3rd party tools that do it, it's that the bundled software that comes with Mac isnt' as good as 3rd party software. This tends to be the case with ALL platforms. I am sure you could find some software (Carbon Copy Cloner I think works right... tho you said it doesn't see the USB drive for some reason) that will do the job correctly on Macs.