[ROBO58]

Hi Folks,

As a PC user who is soon to be a MAC owner I'd like to know if there is a disk imaging solution like Norton Ghost.

I'd like to preserve and be able to totally restore my MAC images. I'd also like to do this on Ethernet connection to another PC or MAC. Please advise as to my options.

Also should one buy and run antivirus on the MAC? If so suggestions on what to buy.

Thanks Robo

[Randman]

It's Mac, not MAC.

Norton doesn't support any OSX products after its utilities ruined many a Mac (search the threads for horror stories). The upshot is:


Avoid all Norton products for OSX.

Are you talking about backups? Sorry, not from the peecee world. There are quite a few apps. Carbon Copy Cloner is a great way to clone a drive onto an external (even made bootable). Again, a simple search of the threads should give more specific answers.

As far as anti-virus, you're safe. If you do a lot of cross-platform work though, it doesn't hurt to have an anti-virus. If you opt for .Mac, you get Virex. The latest version is stable again (one before had a few bugs). Other than that, viruses are part of the world you're leaving behind.

Oh, and if you weren't already planning to, get enough ram. OSX loves ram and it'll mean almost as much as pure Ghz.

[Commodus]

One thing to note is that if you don't need a directly-bootable copy of your OS on a backup drive, you can always just copy and paste your home folder (that will be the one with the Documents/Music/Pictures/etc. sub-folders) into a folder on an external hard drive or secondary drive. You could do the same with the Applications folder as well. If your regular hard drive died and required a replacement, you could just copy back anything you felt necessary from the external drive.

[legacyb4]

Hands down, Carbon Copy Cloner.

[tooki]

Apple's own Disk Utility provides the ability to create and restore locally from disk images. Network restore from disk image is possible in a lab setting using Mac OS X Server (the cheap 10-user version is enough) and a free program called NetRestore (from the same guy who makes Carbon Copy Cloner). It's extremely configurable, and can go from all-manual to full-automatic restore depending on how much you script it. (People have taken NetRestore combined with a web-enabled database to make it automatically configure the IP address, network name, etc. all based on the MAC address of the Mac. Very cool.)

For individual backups to/from disk image, just use Disk Utility while booted from a Mac OS X 10.3 install disc.

tooki

[finboy]

Originally posted by legacyb4:
Hands down, Carbon Copy Cloner.

SuperDuper! works better, IMNHO.

[tooki]

I still recommend using Disk Utility because unlike every other utility, it requires no installed copy of Mac OS X. All you need is your source disk or disk image and a Panther install CD or DVD. All the others require either a second hard disk with Mac OS X installed, or you must create your own custom boot disc using BootCD, but those can be finicky and often take forever to boot from.

tooki

[waffffffle]

I believe you can do network restore from an image using just an OS X install CD. Go into Disk Utility and as the source type in the network URL of the image file. I haven't tried this myself but I believe it works. I think your network requires DHCP for this to work (if you use an IP-based file sharing setup like AFP or SMB, AppleTalk should work without this but I'm not sure).

If this doesn't work you could just make an OS X bootable CD and browse the network to access the image files to restore with. Directions here.

Additionally, as an IT manager that supports mostly PCs and a handful of Macs, I can say with complete confidence that Ghost is crap in comparison to Disk Utility in Panther. Imaging Macs is a breeze and the tools required are built right into OS X for free. Built-in FireWire on all Macs and Target Disk Mode (the ability for your Mac to act like an external FireWire drive for other computers) make supporting Macs a breeze in comparison to PCs.

With Ghost you must boot off the CD into DOS (yes DOS!!!) and be sure to load the right drivers (and wait for them to cycle through and attempt to find your device). Then launch Ghost from the CLI (you have to find the right drive letter on each machine, a *fun* game) and navigate through a shoddy fake GUI to do your imaging. Ghost loves to create corrupt images and automatically spans image files over 2 GB, even if you're saving to an NTFS drive, which is useless and annoying. Just this morning I had Ghost create a completely corrupt image of a 30 GB drive that I had to redo. Then once you're done the only way you can browse the image files is through Ghost explorer. Compare this to OS X where ANY Mac can double-click the image file and mount it as an actual drive on the desktop, manage and edit the contents of the drive. You can't do that on Windows.

[Millennium]

Many of Norton's products since the release of OSX -even OS9 versions which were released close to or after OSX- have a poor reputation. They are said to do more harm than good. I never had any problems personally, but I have avoided them too. Others here have mentioned Carbon Copy Cloner, which is about as close as you get to Ghost; Disk Utility can also work but I have heard about people having trouble making bootable images with it. This seems odd to me, since CCC and DU use the same format, but it's possible that my data is old.

Anti-virus is always a good idea, particularly for switchers, since they often still have to deal with the PC world. Macs are immune to Windows viruses, but can still become carriers by having infected files; the viruses cannot run but do not disappear. If such a file is given to a PC user, the virus will activate and infect the PC. Nowadays, Mac anti-virus programs can detect and remove PC viruses.

There are no known Mac viruses at present, and any viruses which are found will be limited in the damage they can do unless you log in as root, but Macs are not invincible. In the past several months several methods which could be used to write viruses have been discovered, and a proof-of-concept worm has been written (though its author has taken pains to keep it from getting into the wild). Many of the methods used by Windows to write worms are completely closed off on the Mac -Web-based worms are not possible, and e-mail worms are only possible using Microsoft e-mail programs- so completely new methods have had to be found, and this has slowed down the appearance of such programs considerably.

[tooki]

Originally posted by waffffffle:
I believe you can do network restore from an image using just an OS X install CD. Go into Disk Utility and as the source type in the network URL of the image file. I haven't tried this myself but I believe it works. I think your network requires DHCP for this to work (if you use an IP-based file sharing setup like AFP or SMB, AppleTalk should work without this but I'm not sure).

Actually, yes, you're right, I'd forgotten about that! Never tried it, though!

tooki

[tooki]

Originally posted by Millennium:
Others here have mentioned Carbon Copy Cloner, which is about as close as you get to Ghost; Disk Utility can also work but I have heard about people having trouble making bootable images with it. This seems odd to me, since CCC and DU use the same format, but it's possible that my data is old.

I have yet to encounter the problems the Disk Utility naysayers claim to experience. It's always worked 100% for me, be it to/from disk images, or direct disk-to-disk cloning.

tooki

[Lee33]

Originally posted by finboy:
SuperDuper! works better, IMNHO.

I would have said CCC, too. Why do you think SuperDuper is better?

[janeiro]

Originally posted by waffffffle:
I believe you can do network restore from an image using just an OS X install CD. Go into Disk Utility and as the source type in the network URL of the image file. I haven't tried this myself but I believe it works. I think your network requires DHCP for this to work (if you use an IP-based file sharing setup like AFP or SMB, AppleTalk should work without this but I'm not sure).

If this doesn't work you could just make an OS X bootable CD and browse the network to access the image files to restore with. Directions here.

Additionally, as an IT manager that supports mostly PCs and a handful of Macs, I can say with complete confidence that Ghost is crap in comparison to Disk Utility in Panther. Imaging Macs is a breeze and the tools required are built right into OS X for free. Built-in FireWire on all Macs and Target Disk Mode (the ability for your Mac to act like an external FireWire drive for other computers) make supporting Macs a breeze in comparison to PCs.

With Ghost you must boot off the CD into DOS (yes DOS!!!) and be sure to load the right drivers (and wait for them to cycle through and attempt to find your device). Then launch Ghost from the CLI (you have to find the right drive letter on each machine, a *fun* game) and navigate through a shoddy fake GUI to do your imaging. Ghost loves to create corrupt images and automatically spans image files over 2 GB, even if you're saving to an NTFS drive, which is useless and annoying. Just this morning I had Ghost create a completely corrupt image of a 30 GB drive that I had to redo. Then once you're done the only way you can browse the image files is through Ghost explorer. Compare this to OS X where ANY Mac can double-click the image file and mount it as an actual drive on the desktop, manage and edit the contents of the drive. You can't do that on Windows.

As a switcher I really want a powerful tools like ghost, not exactly ghost because is not so powerful, I mean a tool like Acronis True Image (Windows, linux) which is able to make image disk of your systeme and setting and restore it within 3 minutes. You just click on the image True image ask few question to where restore the image, reboot and do the job by itself. As an Sys/Network administrator I use this tool a lot even through the network to reinstall a bunch of PC in one way.

In my opinion CCC isn't the right tool, you still need a bootable HD to clone and work more like an emergency clone than a real backup/restore process. If I'm wrong about it I would be happy to your opinion about CCC... Maybe I missed some features.

Through this thread I red people saying Disk Utility is the RIGHT tool. I really would like to a make an image of my system and be able to just retore my system from that image, so thanks in advance for any advice for using disk utility for backup/restore.

Janeiro

[finboy]

Originally posted by Lee33:
I would have said CCC, too. Why do you think SuperDuper is better?

I found it to be more idiot-proof and easier to use on a regular basis, that's all. It's been a few months since I played with CCC, so maybe it's improved.



Still, it would be nice to find something as straightforward as Ghost, where I could burn to DVD and trust that it would restore my drive. Retrospect used to be that program for me (not self-contained) with a tape drive, but I can't rely on it any more.

[Lee33]

Originally posted by finboy:
I found it to be more idiot-proof and easier to use on a regular basis, that's all. It's been a few months since I played with CCC, so maybe it's improved.



Still, it would be nice to find something as straightforward as Ghost, where I could burn to DVD and trust that it would restore my drive. Retrospect used to be that program for me (not self-contained) with a tape drive, but I can't rely on it any more.

Thanks