[yergish]

Been using something called Martian Lifeboat (www.martian.com).

It's the simplest pgm i've ever used. Just works automatically.

[NoThru22]

What is the difference between LifeBoat and Time Machine (which is free, integrated, and built-in)?

[pipposanta]

Originally Posted by afwalton

What I have in mind is to use Time Machine for backup. If the SSD goes the way of all flesh, would I be able to perform the following steps to restore:

1) Boot from the Type11 bootloader ---> OSX install disc
3) Restore from Time Machine
4) Reboot with bootloader ---> SSD
5) Run DellEFI & reboot

Is that all it would take?

I'm of half a mind to put the bootloader, the OSX installer, and a bootable OSX volume with CCC/SuperDuper on three partitions of one external USB drive. Is there anything wrong, or more complicated than I think it will be, with this plan?

Yeah, I am interested in the use of Time Machine. Will the above steps work for the restore? If it would this is a big achievement!

[NoThru22]

I am afraid that the use of time machine will bring about the dreaded SSD slowdown that a few members have reported.

[Randy]

Newbie question... So if I mount a correct-size USB flash drive, then open OS X Terminal and type this string followed by return:

d if=/dev/sda of=/mounted_usb/ssd.img

Will the flashdrive now be bootable, preserving both the EFI bootloader partition as well as the regular OS X partition?

Thanks,

Randy

[ukbodypilot]

Originally Posted by JoshAnker

+1 for Carbon Copy Cloner. I often used it to make images of ibooks and then load them onto new ones, via a firewire drive.

it DOES have the ability to copy a whole drive block-for-block, and not just file-by-file, so I'm thinking that might mean that it can get the dellEFI/boot partition also. (I've never DONE it, so I won't make any promises )

I just installed Carbon Copy Cloer and it is awesome. It let me make a full backup of my SSD onto a USB drive. The copy is bootable - that is huge for me as it allows me to use stuff like Disk Warrior to maintain my SSD which you can't do on the drive the system booted from - so now i boot off the external, run disk tool whatever and then restart off my SSD

Very happy - thanks for the suggestion

[apparissus]

@Randy: That definitely won't work, though this might:

sudo dd if=/dev/disk0 of=/dev/diskX

Where X is the number of your USB key, which you could get by selecting the USB key in Disk Utility and hitting Command+I (Show Info) or by typing "df" in the terminal and looking for the correct line.

I haven't actually tried this, but I believe it should work and it's certainly closer to what you want. Also this may produce funky results if "disk0" is mounted, not sure on that one.

@NoThru22:

Originally Posted by NoThru22

I am afraid that the use of time machine will bring about the dreaded SSD slowdown that a few members have reported.

What is this dreaded SSD slowdown? I'm using TM on two Minis and haven't noticed anything, but I could just be slow myself....

[NoThru22]

There was an Anandtech article about how once you use all the blocks on your SSD and then begin to write over them, it has a severe slowdown in performance. There was a user who suggested that using Time Machine was causing that more quickly than usual on his Dell Mini. Now I am scared of performing excessive reads/writes with the free space left on my drive. I am expecting for people to start making defragging apps that will prevent this from happening, but the problem is newly discovered.

[irha]

For those who used both dd and carbon copy cloner, is CCC better than dd for doing a complete disk backup? My biggest problem with dd is that it copies all the empty sectors as well. Compressing is useful, but takes a lot more time if done on the fly (filter through gzip etc.) and still doesn't give you the size that you would expect. I am wondering if CCC would do a better job in terms of speed and the compressed size (assuming it even supports compression).

[conq]

Why would you ever run a defragging app on a SSD?