Macbook + Lacie FW drive: Can SuperDuper images be made bootable?

[martin42]

Just to confirm that this works on sweetly on my MacBook. Here's the full gen for any other Macbook newbies here:-

1. Using Disk Utility, I re-partitioned the Lacie d2 300GB Firewire drive using the GUID partition format (press the Options button). I made two partitions, both HFS format. First partition was just slightly more than the size of my internal hard drive; second partition was for all the remaining space. I named the two partitions LACIE_BOOT and LACIE_DATA so that I'd know which was which when they appeared on the desktop.

2. Using Super Duper, I did a full backup directly to the first Lacie partition (not to an image).

3. Rebooting the MacBook while holding down the 'alt' key (old Powerbook users call this the 'option' key just to confuse you!) results in a boot menu showing two devices: the internal disk and the Lacie disk. Booting up off the Lacie disk is simplicity itself. You can tell it's working because you can hear it clunking away, whereas the internal laptop drive is pretty well silent.

For the record, the full backup of my 160 GB drive (which is about 60% full, including three big Parallels VMs) took just 1 hour 20 minutes. I then tried the Smart Update mode, which took just 5 minutes! OK, this hardware isn't exactly slow, but SuperDuper is a pretty impressive piece of software.

PS: I did turn off background anti-virus checks before kicking off the backups: that probably helps a lot.

4. One thing you might want to do from your normal boot system:

sudo mdutil -i off /Volumes/Lacie_boot_drive

This will stop Spotlight messing around indexing the Lacie drive after making the image or updating it. Not that this matters: it just means your Lacie drive will rattle away for half an hour after a smart update has finished.

Anyhow, given that Smart Update only takes 5 minutes, I'll be backing up more often now.

Cheers,

- Martin.