Copying Four Disks onto One
 

I've used SuperDuper! to successfully create a safety clone from one partition onto another of my PowerBook's hard disk, however I have consistently had trouble backing up my hard disk to an external hard drive. After taking a long look at what I've been doing, I finally understand my problem:

I've set up my PB's hard disk into four partitions (the working OS, the safety clone, current work, and OS 9). I want to copy these onto an unpartitioned external hard drive, and have started with the working OS partition using the "Backup—all files" script using the smart update option. Then I would do the same thing for the current work partition using "Backup—all files", smart update option.

It has just occurred to me that in doing this, I am erasing my working OS files when backing up the current work files, which is not what I want to do.

Is is practical to backup four partitions onto an unpartitioned disk? Or could I (somehow) create a custom script which would do this backup for me without partitioning the backup drive? (There's no particular reason why the backup hard drive is not partitioned other than the fact that I have an 80GB hard disk in the PB and the drive is 250GB—I figured that it would be more flexible to work with the unused space in this way.)

Hope this all makes sense, and thanks for any help.

Dewey:

In general, it's not practical -- from a restoration standpoint -- to back up four to one volume. How would you properly restore it?

So, you've got a few choices.

First, you can partition the external drive appropriately. I think this is your best course of action: partition into appropriate sizes, and leave the remainder in its own partition for other storage.

You can also create a two partitions, one for the boot volume and another for data, then store sparse images (as described in the FAQ) for the other three volumes. This simplifies the partitioning, and still gives you a bootable main drive backup... but I'd avoid too many sparse images if you don't have to have them.

Finally, you can go with all sparse images. No direct boot, but the most "disk space" flexibility.

In general, disk space is cheap. So, I'd use the first technique.

That's just what I needed to know, and fast, too! Thanks for the response—now to get backed up (before anything unexpected happens...).

No problem: good luck, and let us know if you have any problems.