Total Mac recovery using Superduper
Came home today to see my first Mac, my G4 iMac in a state of trying to reboot. It just hung there trying to get started. I turned it off unplugged it to reset the power controller and tried to turn it back on. Still no luck– looks like the drive is corrupted. Disk drives have moving parts and therefore finite lives, in real world use it has been shown that drives have a8% chance of failure per year. So make backups!
But like any good mac owner I have been backing up to an external drive using Super-duper! This is the greatest piece of backup software ever. It is simple to use. Just install it, set it to back up to the external drive and create a schedule for it and forget it. It will religiously back up the drive at that time. This machine has been regularly getting backed up since 2002. The time required to backup the drive is very short and requires no user interaction ( I have it set for 2am). I sometimes check just to be sure that it still works. This is not just any kind of back up but a “disk clone”. A disk clone is an exact copy of the drive it is cloning. Exact to the extent that the computer can boot from it while it is attached as an external drive (Windows machines till Vista could not do this). Therefore it can be used in place of the failed drive “as-is”, no long recovery process.
Back to my mac recovery.
To start the recovery process all I had to do was to restart the iMac while holding down the “option” key this gave me a choice of which hard drive I wanted to boot from. I had a bootable backup external drive (created with Superduper! from shirt pocket software) attached to the mac via a firewire cable (Intel Macs can boot from USB external drives too). I selected that external drive from the onscreen menu and the computer booted into the external drive, an exact clone of my dead internal drive. I essentially have a working machine (a bit slower as it is using the external cable but fully functional). I can see all my programs, desktop and data. Now I erased the corrupted internal drive and copied all the files back to the internal drive using superduper. Now just 30 minutes later I am right back where I left off before my iMac had crashed.
It is situations like this that remind me why I chose to move to macs in 2002. I cannot do this with a windows machine. It will not boot from an external drive at all. The internal drive would have to be formatted, Windows would have to be reinstalled (60 min) the OS needs to be re-authenticated. Patches need to be applied. The applications would need to be reinstalled (not copied) one by one, this could take hours (days?). Then of course the backup software itself has to be installed and then the data would have to be copied. All this requires attention from the user to click menu items etc. Even after the machine can be booted, machine is out of operation till the apps and data are installed are installed. So if you were in the middle of an important project when the drive died you are SOL till everything is restored hours later. In the case of the Mac, the computer was usable as soon as it was booted from the external drive, less than 10minutes later and fully restored to a new internal drive in under 30 minutes. Cloning is definitely the way to go for disk recovery. Traditional backups are better for data recovery.
If you have a Mac make sure that you have SuperDuper installed and remember to set a schedule to run it regularly, you will thank me the next time your drive fails.
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