Booting to clone on an external drive?

Question

Hi everyone,
Well, after a couple of scary incidents and some lost data, I finally went out and bought myself a LaCie 250 GB external drive (firewire 400, 800, USB), and am ready to back up everything. My question:
If I make a bootable clone of my entire 30 GB HD in my iBook, how do I boot to that if I have to? I have followed LaCie's recommendation, and formatted and partitioned the drive so that one of the partitions is not significantly larger than my HD, and I have LaCie's Silverkeeper software that came with the drive to make the clone with.
I realise that I may not be framing my question(s) very well, but would appreciate any suggestions that would help me to do this right the first time.
Oh yeah, just how often do you recommend that I back up everything? Only when I make a major upgrade or what?
TIA for your insights!
Kent
iBook G4 (1.2 GHz PowerPC G4)   Mac OS X (10.4.3)  

Answer 1

Kevin wrote: "I just did a quick web search and can't find anything that says Silverkeeper makes a clone of your hard drive"SilverKeeper can create a bootable Duplicate — often referred to as a "clone" — of your startup disk.
Comparing SilverKeeper to Retrospect, here are some of the things that SilverKeeper cannot do that Retrospect can:
- No backup to tape media.
- No Archival or Transfer backups.
- No Encrypted backups.
- No Compressed Backups.
- No Backup Sets: Duplicates only.
- No backup to /restore from server volumes, including Windows NTFS volumes.
- No backup to / restore from FTP server on the Internet.
- Scripting is crude, almost nonexistent.
Comparing SuperDuper to Retrospect, here are some of the things that SuperDuper cannot do that Retrospect can:
- No backup to optical media, e.g. CD or DVD, tape media, or DVD-RAM.
- No Archival or Transfer backups.
- No Encrypted backups.
- No Compressed Backups.
- No Backup Sets: Duplicates only.
- No backup to /restore from server volumes, including Windows NTFS volumes.
- No backup to / restore from FTP server on the Internet.
- Scripting is crude.
SilverKeeper and SuperDuper offer less than Retrospect. They are very basic backup and recovery utilities. I've used all of the Retrospect functions except backup to an NTFS-formatted volume, though that can be handy in mixed Mac / Windows environments.
Retrospect's ability to create various types of backups — Duplicates, Backup Sets, etc. — to any media is exceptionally powerful. See my "Backup and Recovery" FAQ for the definitions of Duplicates and Backup Sets.
If you're only interested in creating bootable backups (clones) of your startup disk on another hard drive, such as a FireWire drive, that can be accomplished with any of Retrospect, SilverKeeper, or SuperDuper. For some users, creating a Duplicate or "clone" may be enough, and it beats no backup at all. However, once you get beyond this most basic form of backup, Retrospect outshines them all: it is the "Swiss Army Knife" of backup and recovery solutions and remains the state-of-the-art in Mac backup and recovery solutions.
I've looked at them all, and continuously reevaluate backup and recovery solutions, but each time I come back to the following: I still only trust my priceless data to Retrospect. But to each their own.
Good luck!
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X
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