[DM-MUG] I'm Tiger'ed - or is that tired

[Bill Davis]

I'd encourage everyone who backups up to a hard disk to have TWO 
backups (or an alternate backup method).

There've been a lot of problems in recent upgrades with external 
firewire drives.  With Tiger there are apparently problems with 
external Maxtor one-touch drives (which I have, dagnabit).  Although it 
looks like it's just their kernel extensions for the "one touch backup" 
button...which I didn't install (such things are always problems 
eventually).

I have a hard disk at home and a DIFFERENT brand of hard disk at work 
for off-site backup. (I have a powerbook, so I just take it to work and 
back it up weekly or before upgrades.)   Note the different brand of 
hard disk or a different form of backup is important.  I'm considering 
a third method, of important things like my photos, music, documents to 
CD-R or DVD-R too....and a safe deposit box. Nice for historical 
purposes too, something that a hard disk clone backup doesn't provide.

It's gotten to the point that Apple recommends unplugging all your 
peripherals in general and your drives specifically when upgrading.  
This bothers me.  I think they aren't trying to solve the problem, 
they're trying to avoid it.   We never used to have to do this.  I 
suppose it's good advice, even if there are no problems, but there ARE 
problems, new ones each time, and I am starting to wonder if it's Apple 
being lazy or the peripheral makers getting "cheap" these days.  
Firewire hasn't turned out to be better and more reliable than SCSI, 
even in the hot-plugging department.

Does anyone have conclusive evidence that the Archive install or the  
Clone->Wipe->Fresh install->Migrate route give any appreciable speedups 
or reliability issues?  I hate reinstalls from scratch, and I can't see 
how the latter route would clean much in the way of cruft out of your 
system.   My Mac is quite reliable (it's probably been a year since the 
last kernel panic, maybe more, and about the only app that ever crashes 
on me is Safari) so I'd only consider a fresh reinstall if there was a 
measurable benefit.

  - Bill


On May 4, 2005, at 1:25 PM, Bryan Baker wrote:

> Well, Tiger (client) arrived yesterday (which considering that Amazon 
> didn't get it shipped until friday night at ~ 11pm isn't too bad. I'm 
> glad the estimates were wrong. It might have even been here monday, 
> but UPS decided to hang on to it in Davenport  - what you get for 
> picking "slow-boat".
>
> Anyway, I had a PTO meeting to go to after work, so I couldn't start 
> anything until that was over (~8) and I decided I needed a drive to 
> clone to, so I burned another 1/2 running to pick up an IDE HD to slap 
> into my firewire box. By about 9 I was starting to tinker.
>
> The reason for picking up a fresh drive was so I could do a 
> "Clone->Wipe/Install Fresh->Migrate from clone" install. The last time 
> I did this (about 1.5 yrs ago :-)) I used CCC to do the cloning, but 
> I'd seen some oblique references to Disk Utility's ability to clone a 
> drive using ASR, but hadn't seen any clear documentation or 
> instruction and the instructions on the "Restore" tab weren't too 
> transparent, so it confused me. I started trying to use "Make Image 
> from Folder" but I knew I'd end up with a .dmg or .img file and I 
> wasn't sure I would be able to use the migrate tool with it. While I 
> was about midway through, I discovered a more straightforward 
> reference on the web that said in plain english: You can clone a drive 
> using the "Restore" tab of "Disk Utility" using the drive to be cloned 
> as the source (my old internal)  and the destination set as the shiny 
> new drive i wanted the clone to be on. By the time I'd really got it 
> started right, it was about 11:30pm I kept checking on it until I 
> finally went to sleep ~ 1am - at about 4am I got up to go to the 
> bathroom, so I checked and sure enough it was done cloning - I booted 
> off the clone (to check) and it looked like it worked fine. And being 
> paranoid, I also decided to back up my iPhoto library and my full 
> (~25gb) iTunes library. That was going to take a while as well, so 
> went back to bed. Got up about 6 or so and that was done - time to 
> start the install. Got to the install "style" page, held my breath and 
> clicked the one that said wipe/install fresh. I did this so that I 
> could have the new migration wizard move all my files for me (and 
> leave out the kruft) and get a fairly fresh start. Once it finished 
> the install and restarted, it gave me the option to migrate from an 
> old "machine" in this case it was just my firewire drive, not another 
> machine acting as if it were a firewire drive. It let me choose quite 
> a few options (I could have left off my applications) - in fact it 
> also saw the partition where I "double" backed up my iPhoto and iTunes 
> files - I was worried that I didn't have enough room until I 
> un-checked that drive :-) - it chugged away while I got ready for the 
> day and finished in time for me to play for about 15 or 20 minutes 
> before I had to go. I didn't have a lot of time to verify all went 
> well, but it seems to have. I'll find out more tonight :-)
>
> --
> Bryan Baker
> President
> Des Moines Macintosh Users Group
> http://www.dmmug.org
> president@dmmug.org
>
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