[maddog]

If your Mini is working correctly with whatever version of Mac OS X, then I suggest the following;
1. Get Carbon Copy Cloner from Carbon Copy Cloner - Home. Send a donation because you are going to be using it a lot (I am not Bombich nor I know him).
2. Buy an external USB HD, it doesn't have to be big since the Mini's SSD is not that big.
3. Clone the internal SSD, with the working OS, to the the external HD using Carbon Copy Cloner.
4. The fact that you cloned your OS does not mean that the external HD will be bootable. After cloning you have to run NBI in the external HD. After that you should have a "spare" HD with your OS in case you have problems upgrading.
5. Test your external HD by connecting it to your Mini, restarting it, enabling "USB Legacy Support" (press 2 on restart) and selecting your External HD as a startup disk (USB device).
6. If it boots OK, then make the adjustments you made to your original system to have , sound, sleep, etc. by copying the files from your SSD to the appropriate folders in your external HD.
7. Make sure you can boot from your external HD and have the system as you want it, by testing it again.
8. You can use Carbon Copy Cloner to make incremental back ups to your external HD, so that you always have an up to date copy of your current system (do not do Time Machine, it is not bootable).
9. When it is time to make an upgrade, go nuts. Any problems you can always login from your external HD and clone it back to your SSD.

It works! I just did that upgrading to 10.6.5 and now I have 2 perfectly good 10.6.5 systems to boot from.
And, I am not afraid of trying anything.


P.S. Note, every time you clone a HD you have to run NBI in the cloned HD, otherwise it will not be bootable (or recognized)
P.P.S. Always use the latest NBI

[elpibe10]

Great tip. Thanks

[Casper]

After pooching my Mini to the point of having to re-install XP (yuch) and then re-hacking
10.5.8, I've done the same. At least I had a current time Machine backup for my files...

[Akki]

I tucked a SDHC card into my machine and set it up as Time Machine backup. I've kept the USB image from my install. So in emergency I just boot from the install image, restore from time machine and re-run NBI.

[gavidoc]

Thanks for the tip. I borked my OS while reworking the card reader as an apple cardreader and doing this worked great. All I did was repartition my 1 Tb portable hard drive into two. A small one for the clone copier and the other for storage.

[maddog]

Originally Posted by Akki

I tucked a SDHC card into my machine and set it up as Time Machine backup. I've kept the USB image from my install. So in emergency I just boot from the install image, restore from time machine and re-run NBI.

Akki,
I stopped doing that because my SDHC card would always crap out and it would need to be reformatted every so often. Now I use it as just another drive in the mini and have not had any problems (so far).

Are you having any problems with the card as TM?

[Casper]

Are the SDHC cards large enough for this? What size are you using?

[underwhelmed]

Originally Posted by Casper

Are the SDHC cards large enough for this? What size are you using?

I don't use mine for this, but I have a 32 Gig SD card in my mini.

[Akki]

My 16GB PNY has worked just fine. TM did corrupt it's backups once and I just reformatted it. I know the SDHC are not the most reliable but so far knock on wood its been great.

[Casper]

Is there a SD card large enough for TM?