Backup outside the scope of Time Machine ?

Comprehensive Backup (beyond Time Machine) ?

Recently got a new Mac with MacOS Leopard. Want to ensure the system drive is backed up before doing anything else. Mindful that I will be using XP under Parallels on it, want to establish a backup method that caters for both the MacOS part and the Parallels parts.

I understand that if I was using MacOS alone, the system drive could painlessly be backed up by MacOS's "Time Machine" to an external drive. However when there is a virtual machine under Parallels (say), its image (hdd) file should be excluded from the Time Machine backup, because otherwise the (continuously changing) image file will soak up Time Machine in terms of disk space and CPU time.

In that case, the image files still require backing up. What do people do about this? Just periodically copy the image files manually to the backup drive?

Following some peoples' advice, I am planning to initially use Ubuntu linux liveCD to simply "dd" the whole system disk (via gzip) onto an external drive. The reason is that it is simple and foolproof, especially since MacOS would in that case not be running, hence all data on the system drive would be static while it was being backed up. For that I guess I'd need a partition in "efs" filesystem. Does anybody else do that, or is it considered unnecessary?

With the above in mind, I bought a Western Digital "Elements" external USB drive of 1Tb (as opposed to 1TB), initially formatted in FAT32, with the intention of partitioning it into the standard Apple Mac OSX journaled filesystem and linux ext3 filesystem partitions. So far this has not worked too well. MacOS disk utility gave error messages (reported by other people also) when I tried to partition it. Apparently the previous MacOS (Tiger) can handle this disk type but for some reason Leopard (which is all I have) cannot.

Unless I can at least format it for MacOS then I guess it won't even be usable by Time Machine.

As a workaround I tried using Ubuntu linux, from its LiveCD (not installed). From Ubuntu linux, I used the "GUID Partition Table" (GPT) option to define two partitions on the external USB drive, the first one empty and the second one with efs3 (which I think is the linux standard). It appeared to work thus far - no error messages.

Then I came out of Ubuntu and rebooted to MacOS (Leopard), from where I was hoping to use Disk Utility to make the empty (first) partition as a MacOS partition. When I plugged in the USB, MacOS gave the error message: "Disk Insertion: The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer", presumably implying that MacOS doesn't recognize linux's efs3 filesystem. The USB drive was seen by Disk Utility however. From that utility, I saw the two partitions, I selected the first one and attempted to partition it as "MacOS Extended Journaled". However on clicking the "Apply" button, it said: "Partition failed with the error: Filesystem resize support required, such as HFS+ with journaling enabled". Anyone know what the problem and/or solution is here? This seems so close to success!

Overall, this seems really hard going for a new Mac+Parallels user! Is that a normal experience? Or is there some simpler method to back everything up onto the Western Digital external drive ? Or is there some way to remove the problem that MacOS Disk Utility seems to have with partitioning this drive? Or just a firm formula of how best to partition and format the drive for the described backup purposes? For example, is my attempted structure ("MacOS Extended Journaled" + "efs3" partitions under GPT) on the right track ?

Many thanks for any help to solve the backup/format/disk conundrum so that I can get going with my new machine this Christmas!

 

Some success!

I have succeeded in partitioning the Western Digital Elements 1Tb (not 1TB) drive under GPT into Mac OSX's HFS+ and (de facto) linux's ext3, as well as a FAT32 partition. I understand now that for sure that I should use GPT partitioning system, MacOSX can make HFS+ partitions but linux cannot, linux can make ext3 partitions but Mac OSX cannot (nor can it see them, at least natively). Hence:

First I used Mac OSX's "Disk Utility" to create the HFS+ partition and two FAT32 partitions. Then I LiveCD-booted to Ubuntu (8.10), opened commandline shell as root, and used command line "parted" (not fdisk as this doesn't recognize GPT) to redefine one of the FAT32 partitions as "ext3", then used "mkfs -t ext3" to format that partition as ext3. Also did a chmod a+w to that partition, so anyone could write to it. From Ubuntu GUI, demonstrated ability to drag files to both the ext3 and the fat32 partitions.

Then used the following command to backup a compressed version of the whole system drive (/dev/sda) onto the ext partition (/dev/sdb3):
dd if=/dev/sda | gzip -9 > /dev/sdb3
(The "-9" gives slower/better compression)

To arrive at this point, googling and experimentation ate up most of my Boxing Day but at least it seems to work so far..

Anyone care to comment on how straightforward (or not) it is to recover the system drive from such a backup e.g. to the same or a replacement system hard disk?

 

Failure

Oh no it didn't work:

Took 5 hours (overnight) to complete the process but aftterwards the target folder was empty. Worse, the ext3 partition and/or its contents appears corrupted. Some things say it's full, others say its empty, and the Gnu "GParted" utility doesn't recognize it as ext3, indeed it displays a triangular warning sign aside it.

So I guess the method described above has some kind of flaw(s).

 

A Solution - Good Backup Arrangement

The key to success here was "Don't Go Outside OS X" i.e. in my case don't use linux.

My good backup system to cope with Mac, Boot Camp (possibly more than one) and Parallels, agreed by Apple store experts, is to get an external USB drive, split it into separate HFS+ (standard Mac OS X format) partitions for:
1) Time Machine (sole use)
2) Bootable Backup (actually I have 2 partitions for these).
3) General. In it create Directories for Parallel VMs, System Images, Boot Camp images (etc)

Usage:
1) Configure Time Machine to exclude Parallels VMs and also the external drive's partitions.
2) To backup VMs, just drag them into appropriate folder in General.
3) To Backup Boot Camp, use WInClone (free utility makes OS X compatible image of windows)
4) To make bootable or non-bootable backups e.g. of clean or just-configured initial system state (would eventually get pushed out of Time Machine), use the OS X install disk's Disk Utility.

Of course the external drive can itself be cloned, but not by standard linux 'dd' but rather by a GPT-aware application, otherwise the two disks will end up with the same GUID and an operating system (now or in future) may confuse and hence corrupt them. I'm not sure what the best GPT-aware cloner/synchronizer is, but expect the Disk Utility may offer something basic and I have been recommended (by non Apple people) SuperDuper (duplicator) for example.

I've had this arrangement in place a while now, and it works and tests out smoothly, but just now thought it would be good to "give back" to the Forum Community, in case it helps anyone else.

 

Very easy solution is to use g4l from http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l