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Cloning for Fun and FunctionBy Francine Schwieder |
Back in the pre-X days, if you got a new drive, or just wanted a back-up, you could copy your working system by a simple drag-'n-drop of the System Folder. Presto, you could now boot off your new drive or have a simple way to replace anything in the System Folder that might get corrupted, and thus fix various sorts of problems that cropped up. One of the most annoying shortcomings of the Brave New World of X is that making this sort of system clone is no longer possible.
In the first place everything you need to have the system work the way it does right now is no longer in one place. There is no System Folder containing all the stuff that runs your computer your way. There are pieces of it hither and yon, or, to be more exact, there is a folder called System with some of it, another folder called Library with other pieces, and many of the preferences you have set, and files used by programs, are in your home folder inside of that Library folder. If you use Eudora as your mail program your mailboxes are now in your home folder inside the Documents folder. Your bookmarks are in the home Library folder, and so on. You can't copy just one folder and have all your system thingies, preferences, mail and bookmarks ready to go from a new place.
Furthermore, there are many crucial pieces of the operating system that are invisible, others that are invisible and are symbolic links (which are NOT the same as an alias, even though they are the UNIX equivalent of an alias) and they are not in either System or Library or home, but live wild and free at the root level of your drive. And most of the System pieces can only be copied by root or super user, and even if you manage to find and copy the stuff the permissions will be screwed up and your copy won't work. What to do?
I've been consulting with my brother the UNIX guru about this since the days of the OS X beta, and he says one of the shortcomings of UNIX is the inability to easily make a clone. For awhile his recommendation was to buy and use Retrospect Backup 5.0 from Dantz, but recently he had trouble with it, too. I couldn't figure out how to download and try a Mac version, only a Windoze business version, and wasn't about to pay good money for a program before I had it in my possession and knew whether I liked the way it worked or not, so I haven't tried it.
One of the most popular solutions is to use Carbon Copy Cloner, a shareware program from Mike Bombich. There are a couple of things that have kept me from using it: I've seen it bomb out trying to copy a drive, I've known people to get copies of their drive that are screwed up, and I've seen some HTML code written for CCC help that won't work in some browsers, due to the presence of a really dumb character at the start of the code. Hey, writing correct HTML isn't that hard, even I can do it, and if the HTML isn't right I feel a certain lack of trust in any other code written by the same guy. But many people swear by it, just as many people swear by Jaguar, so don't let me discourage you from trying it. It might work fine for you. Maybe Jag runs just fine for you, too. So by all means run Jaguar and back it up with CCC. I don't, but that's no reason for you not to.
The first method I used to make a clone of a drive was to reboot in OS 9, use ResEdit to find and make visible all hidden files at the root level of the drive, then drag and drop the lot onto the new drive. It wouldn't boot, so I then ran an OS X updater over the top of the copied system. That worked, but is pretty clumsy and isn't a true clone.
Recently I used a slightly more sophisticated method. I still did the reboot in 9, used ResEdit to make all root level files visible, then copied all but symbolic links and files created by the Finder or System on startup to the new partition. I then rebooted into my working OS X partition and used the Terminal to make the symbolic links. You need to use the sudo command, and the resultant links probably have the wrong owner, but that doesn't seem to matter (my brother said as long as the world can execute them the ownership was irrelevant). In the Terminal you must first issue the command "cd /Volumes/backup" (without the quotes, and instead of "backup" use the name of your partition). Next, issue the following command: "sudo ln -s /private/cores" [in 10.1.5 only], repeat to make links for /private/etc, /private/tmp, and /private/var. After you boot into your cloned system, be sure to launch the Disk Utility (for a Jaguar backup), or Apple's free Repair Privileges utility for 10.1.x, and fix the permissions on your cloned drive. The copying and permissions fixes can take quite awhile if you have multi-gigabytes of stuff, as I do. I have ended up with a bootable Jaguar partition and a bootable 10.1.5 partition on my new LaCie 200GB drive, plus a freshly made clone of my iBook on the same drive, and I just finished booting the iBook from the LaCie. So this method should work for you, too. BTW, just for fun I tried booting the G4 tower from the iBook clone on the LaCie, and, rather to my surprise, it actually booted.
List of Files Copied:
After you finish moving, reboot, and correct permissions, if you do a list all command "ls -al" you see something that looks a bit like this:
You'll notice that a number of the files that are in this list don't appear in the list of files to be copied. That's because they are created by the System itself each time it boots. These include the two dot files and the DS_Store file (which is the saved info about your settings for the Finder window of that folder/partition), the Trashes files, Desktop files, Network, Temporary Items, and VolumeSettings. The list also includes a file for my custom drive icon, .VolumeIcon.icns, and a couple of folders I created: Apps (my folder full of aliases to the Applications I use, which I put in the Dock for quick access), a Downloads folder where all Internet apps put their downloads, XonX, where I'm storing everything I download having to do with X11, the Developer tools folder, created when you install that stuff, and the sw folder created by Fink (another X11 related goodie--NOT the folder that Virex is creating named the same thing, which will screw up your Fink install).
Of course, what we really need is for Apple to write and give us a true blue Apple utility for cloning our drives. Why they haven't I do not know. They could, and they do have Apple Software Restore, which was an OS 9 program, working in the Jag Terminal (try typing "man asr"), and there are various Terminal commands to copy Apple type files, complete with their resource forks. But they haven't thus far made a nice GUI backup utility. OK Apple, we're waiting. Do it and there will be yet another reason to prefer Apple's implementation of UNIX to the other flavors.
BTW, I know it can be done, because it has been done. There is a nifty utility based on the UNIX "dd" command, which makes an exact copy of your drive to another drive or partition. The problem with issuing this command yourself from the Terminal is that it ignores irrelevant, to UNIX, things like resource forks and other goodies specific to MacX. But CopyCatX from SubRosaSoft not only solves those problems, it also gives you a simple, elegant GUI to use to clone your drive. The only limitation is that the place you clone to must be as big or bigger than the clone source. The demo version allows you try it out a couple of times, then, if you continue to use it, it will cost you 40 bucks. I tried it the other day to clone the most recent working version of 10.1.5 to a partition on the LaCie drive and it worked like a champ. If you go this route you might consider then using Chronosync from Econ Technologies to keep your backup folders synchronized with your working drive. It is amazingly speedy and is a mere $20.