So as I said I would in my recent post on the bad blocks on my internal hard disk, I went out and bought a third external Firewire hard drive. This purchase was long overdue, because no matter what, I need to be able to backup my system, not just my data which is on the other 2 external drives. It would have saved me a lot of grief and stress and down time had I done it earlier.
I installed Mac OS X on the new external drive, ran all the software updates, and then attempted to use Apple’s Migration utility to copy over the data from the internal disk to the external one. It only partially worked in that it copied over all of the applications and whatever files were at the root of my drive (pretty cool!), but it copied and then immediately deleted my user folder. Tried it twice. Same result. Pretty nasty bug. So I had to migrate my user folder (documents, application preferences, etc.) by hand.
I then booted and ran off of the external disk for a few days, and when I was reasonably convinced that it was stable and that I wasn’t missing any important files from my internal drive, I did what Apple support asked me to do: I erased the internal disk, using the option of zeroing out all the data on the drive, which maps out bad sectors. That took about 3 hours on the 250 GB disk.
I was going to do everything in reverse–install the OS, run the migration utility etc.–but remembered there existed some « disk-cloning » utilities. UNIX systems have thousands of files that are hidden from the user. These cloning utilities know how to copy them, and set all the proper file access permissions, keep symbolic links intact, etc.
CarbonCopyCloner has good reviews but I had checked it out in the past, and thought the UI felt clunky, and the documentation is close to non-existant.
So I checked-out SuperDuper! by Shirt Pocket Software. It reminded me how tragically rare good software is. While backup utilities are about as boring and unsexy as software can get, this program is in all regards an absolute gem. It is very well thought-out and designed, with a clean, clear and flawless UI. It keeps telling you in simple terms what you are about to do, and does a good job of stopping you from doing potential damage. The advanced features are not in the way of the basic features. All this is consistent with the pretty funny tagline: « Heroic System Recovery For Mere Mortals. »
The documentation is excellent. And the « marketing » approach is great too: you can download and use it for free to perform full backups. Paying the modest shareware fee unlocks extra features, like incremental backups.
Of course, all this would be moot if it didn’t perform as advertised. So yesterday, I launched the cloning operation and about 4.5 hours later, I rebooted on my internal hard drive, to a perfect replica of the system on the external disk.
So, needless to say, I’ll be buying SuperDuper! and using it to regularly backup my internal HD to the new external one. In fact, the mere fact that it is so perfectly designed will be an incentive in itself to use it, and therefore actually perform regular backups.
And time will tell if the internal disk is totally cured or not.