I used Carbon Copy Cloner to back up my MacBook’s drive before installing OS X 10.5 “Leopard”. Instead of storing the data on my ocassionally flaky “Coolmax” 3.5″ enclosure (with non-flaky 500GB Maxtor drive), I chose to put the drive in my PowerMac G5 and clone in a machine-to-machine fashion using Firewire.
This is not a step-by-step, but rather just some thoughts I thought I’d pass on to those who may run into the same bumps I did with Carbon Copy Cloner:
On Mac OS
- enable Remote Login on the target machine
- mount the target machine’s volume
On CCC
- Target Disk -> Select a Target -> Remote Macintosh… here you must use a “.local” extension on your target machine’s name, for instance “G5.local”. “G5″ did not work for me.
- CCC creates an authentication certificate that you must install on both machines
Hope this helps!
November 27th, 2007 at 10:30 am
Of course, your other method of network backup with Carbon Copy Cloner is what I call the SuperDuper! method. Before I started using CCC, I was a registered SuperDuper! user. In order to backup over the network. You would create a read/write sparse image on the mounted drive and then backup to the image. Worked great and SuperDuper! even had built in support for auto-mounting your drive before backup.
Well, CCC doesn’t seem to have the ability to auto-mount a sparse image stored on a network volume, but you can set a script to run before and after the backup. I haven’t bothered, but I would see no reason one couldn’t write a shell script that instructs CCC to mount your network volume before it runs the backup and then another shell script that would unmount the volume after the backup finishes.
Please note, that you mount the actual volume, not the disk image. CCC, or SuperDuper! for that matter, actually handles the whole mount the disk image, back up your files, then unmount the disk image, part of the process.
In order to get Carbon Copy Cloner to work the “SuperDuper! network backup way”, I simply mount the network volume manually via the finder, then the scheduled backup handles the rest automatically.
The benefit in choosing this method of network backup is that any mountable drive over the network should work fine. Pick a safe file name for the disk image and then the actual files themselves should be okay as they are only ever mounted locally on your Mac. I would guess that an image mounted over a Samba share would work okay. Also handy for running CCC to a server still on Panther, which doesn’t support the CCC authentication certificate method.
This thread mentions backing up to a computer running Ubuntu (so backing up over Samba must work fine). In theory, I should be able to set the CCC “Scheduled Tasks…” to execute the backup whenever the remote volume is mounted, but I can’t seem to get things working, contrary to the poster’s success on the Ubuntu Forums.
Nathan
November 27th, 2007 at 10:38 am
Sorry I don’t think I was clear enough with this point:
What I meant to say was that CCC doesn’t seem to have the ability to auto-mount the remote volume containing the sparse image. Clearly CCC can auto-mount the spare image itself, as I even point out later with the following:
Still not sure why my backup when remote volume is connected doesn’t work automatically as a scheduled task, but things are fine as long as I set a daily backup schedule and then make sure to mount the volume manually sometime prior to the backup running.
Nathan