Members hyperstationjr Posted August 15, 2006 Members Share Posted August 15, 2006 I FINALLY picked up an external HD large enough to back-up to. I found a WD 320gig FW/USB2 external HD for $180. I formated the drive and have already loaded all of my music, video, graphic and text documents. I'm going to make sure I have backup's of installation software, as well as hard copies of the software I NEED (as opposed to just free crap I never use). The reason for all of this (besides just safe-keeping my work and information) is I plan on cleaning my (5 year old) G4 out and installing Tiger, nice and clean. The spec's on my machine are still ok (Dual 1.25gHz proc., 120g HD, 200g HD, 1.25g Ram...) but it's been slowing down a little lately and it's needed a clean-up for a long, long time. My question is, is there anything further I need to do or save before I clean this bad-boy out? How do I save stuff like Core-Audio setup's? Should I save or make a backup of the system? Any advice in general about the move? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members moogerfooger Posted August 15, 2006 Members Share Posted August 15, 2006 what are you running now? -- usually all you have to do is use the archive and install method of up grading -- all your setting and accounts and preferences will be preserved. just in case your running PT -digi oo1 -- you better check digi compatability-- you can hose your system going to tiger. i have a digi 001 at work that i use for video post - on a 1ghz dual that I screwed up and had to reformat and start over. - took a whole day of my life to get it back together. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members hyperstationjr Posted August 16, 2006 Author Members Share Posted August 16, 2006 Well the thing is I want to clean the system out. I WANT to loose a lot of these old files, but there are some I want to retain... Really though, the only thing I care to keep are my CoreAudio preferances and my desktop look... that's about it... seems like I can just dump the whole thing and install from scratch... I don't have any Digi hardware so that's not an issue... I think my MOTU serup should be fine... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members stikygum Posted August 16, 2006 Members Share Posted August 16, 2006 Are you using it for storage for some of your bigger music applications? I was thinking of doing this and storing all my songs I make in Logic on a external FW drive. How fast is the WD drive for loading and everything? I was thinking about installing a bigger internal drive on my Macbook, but the biggest right now that fits is a 120 gig HD internal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members hyperstationjr Posted August 17, 2006 Author Members Share Posted August 17, 2006 I wouldn't know about that stuff. I'm using the WD drive only for backup. I have a 120g 7200rpm HD in for my OS and applications, a 200g 7200 HD for all of my documents, and now a 320 external for backup... You could probably use this WD drive for loading audio, 7200rpm w/ firewire seems plenty fast to me... They also make what's called I think a "Network HD" or something similar, which runs w/ I think USB2 or Firewire AND Ethernet, which I would imagine would be plenty fast for that application... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members zeronyne Posted August 17, 2006 Members Share Posted August 17, 2006 If this is your only backup drive (I know, that sounds funny, doesn't it?), your best option would be to CLONE the whole thing (not just drag stuff over) using a third party app. Then you do a clean install of the OS. It will prompt you to find a profile account and you can specify the one you want off of your backup. Then all that's left is to drag over all the files you want and reinstall the apps. Keep in mind, though, that a lot of application problems stem from bad permissions, receipts, and prefs. Even though it's a colossal pain, I reinstall everything from scratch. Resetting the prefs for Core Audio and MIDI (especially the MIDI) is painstaking, but it kind of refreshes in my mind just what the hell is going on in my studio. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members hyperstationjr Posted August 17, 2006 Author Members Share Posted August 17, 2006 I asked this question in another forum though... Why should I copy my whole system?I've backed up all my important documents.I'm in the process of making sure I have all my installation disks and files (either on CD or on the backup HD).I don't have very many preferences aside from my desktop and my CoreAudio (which I too would like to know what the hell is going on!).I have my old OS on disk incase things go wrong, and I'll have a copy of Tiger which I want to install (as soon as I make sure all my Apps will work...). So what's the point of backup up the whole system as opposed to my documents? I'm asking because I really would like to know before I go and dump the whole thing... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members zeronyne Posted August 17, 2006 Members Share Posted August 17, 2006 Well, the NEXT revision of OS X (Leopard) is going to have a roll back feature. In XP it's called "boot from last known good configuration" (or something to that effect...I haven't had to look at that in XP in a LONG time). Let's say you do a clean install of Tiger and two of your hardware drivers no longer work. Or your app can no longer see a peripheral. Or you forgot to port over some preference and you cannot remember what it was. Or you had a password on the keychain that you never use that you now need. Wouldn't it be nice to pull out the backup drive and just reboot from there? I have redundant backups...one for just the documents (I'm always saving to two drives as I go) and a clone of my drive that I do once a month and keep offline. It saved my ass several times until last week when the power went out WHILE I WAS BACKING UP. OS X REALLY doesn't like that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members FunkyLaptop Posted August 17, 2006 Members Share Posted August 17, 2006 Try the shareware app SuperDuper - you can find it, and many others, at Versiontracker.com. It will do simple backups for free, and about $28 will get you more features and scheduling. All the uber nerds I look up to like it. Carbon Copy Cloner is good, and free, but it has not been updated in a long time. LaCie has a free tool call Silverkeeper. Unlike the other two, which deal in disk images, this one will copy files and folders over to the other drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members packrat Posted August 18, 2006 Members Share Posted August 18, 2006 Carbon copy cloner hasn't been updated in a while? there were a few updates around the tiger release era last year to fix some issues (I thought) and I believe apple even worked around a problem they caused in it because it's such a widely used program. In particular, you really really want to have a cloned disk on your external drive because (assuming it's a firewire thingy), you can quite easily boot of it if your internal drive goes spang for some reason. I frequently do this with my various laptops that I care about. So I've use CCC on tiger based machines quite recently with great success. The website has been updated with information about what you can and can't do with the intel macs too. B> B> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members moogerfooger Posted August 18, 2006 Members Share Posted August 18, 2006 if all you're looking to do is back up the core audio and midi prefs-- you can find them the librarys --the global setting are in the root/ library/ audio/ -- account related setting are in root/ users/ you/ library/ audio you could make copies of each library folder or just the audio folders -- (be sure you denote which is which) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.