I was dissapointed that Panther did not ship with a backup/restore solution. Due to just purchasing the new Powerbook buying software including .Mac was out of the question. I have come up with the solution below which I'd like your suggestions on in case it has any issues.
This solution is designed for those who do not have access to a large external drive which would be much better. It is ideal for those who are required to backup large amounts of data to DVD/CD.
Note: You will need to be in terminal as root.
Backup
1. Backup your data, we use the rsrcFork to ensure we backup proprietary apple MetaData. Obviously replace my home Directory with your source and my destination with your preferred one.
ditto -X -c -z -rsrcFork /Users/Phil/ /tmp/backup.cpgz
2. Split your data so that it can fit on your media
for CD:
split -b 650m /tmp/backup.cpgz backup
for DVD:
split -b 4600m /tmp/backup.cpgz backup
You data is now ready to be manually backed up to media.
Restore
After copying all the files to a surface on your HD.
1. Join your data.
cat /restoredpath/backup* > /tmp/backupimg.cpgz
2. Restore your data.
ditto -x -z -V /tmp/backupimg.cpgz /Users/Phil/Restored/
The good news is this will cost you nothing and works with all software you already have. There are some serious drawbacks that you need to understand:
1- This is not a bootable backup even if you backup / instead of /Users
2- This backup requires a LOT of free space it will not work if you want to backup 50GB of data on a 60GB drive.
I have only had my PB for a few days now so hopefully I have missed something balatantly simple?? I could not find a simple way to have the Burn utility say "Cannot Fit on Media - will require X blanks','Insert Media 1' ... 'Insert media X'....
Thanks,
Phil
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