Full backup of Mac HD hangs up

Question

If you take this post down, claiming that it’s only a request for an improvement, I might work up the nerve to read it on YouTube. How, exactly, am I supposed to fully back up and restore an -entire- Mac Mini hard drive, to and from an external FAT32 Passport USB drive, under OS X 10.4.11?
It doesn't work. Even after enabling and logging back in as the root user, a straight drag and drop copy hangs up on permissions. Even if I managed to fix all the permissions with Disk Utility, somewhere within the thousands of files, and/or apply read-write permissions to all files via Get Info, copy still hangs up on java aliases and *.sh files, claiming that the Passport drive cannot accept them. Why? It's just ones and zeros. Did the Passport drive clench its knees together and say no? Nor can I use Disk Utility to make an image file of the Mac hard drive. It hangs up claiming that a resource is busy. Clenching its knees together, no doubt. Nor can I use “Time Machine”. Apple was so kind and thoughtful as to remove from the market any Time Machine support it may have had for PowerPC in 10.5, if any, when it brought out Snow Leopard.
The ability of OS X to take a *.dmg file, open it and allow the application to simply be dropped into the HD is beautiful and elegant. Especially compared to the pain of having to verify that all the necessary mother and daughter module versions are present with Linux. But what possessed Apple to let OS X loose on the public without providing a dead easy and reliable way to back up and restore a hard drive? Was it the “Here’s my card; call me when you’re ready to compromise” syndrome?
I may have been mystified by the workings of that old IBM 600-series vacuum tube computer with the rotating magnetic drum memory, but I’m pretty sure that the operators could dump and load the operating system and applications using punch cards. What was Apple thinking when it declined to provide such a basic and necessary function? After losing 2/3 of my hard drive to incomplete and misleading Mac Help instructions on setting up a RAID system, I’d really like to back up the remaining portion, repartition the drive and start over. But nooo, that would be way too simple.
What Apple did well, it did very well. But what it neglected is every bit as insomnia-, ulcer-, and high BP-friendly as anything Microsoft ever did. What could have been so hard about providing basic backup and restore functions that it took until OS X 10.5 to figure out? I seem to remember that MS-DOS could do that. Not to mention earlier machines using punch cards and paper tape.
The least Apple could do, if it can’t tell us how to perform the maneuver successfully, is fix that oversight and provide an appropriate update to 10.4.

Answer 1

Thanks, Thomas. It should say something that I get my understanding of the whole MAC process from MAC Help. I did not think in terms of a bootable clone, but simple mass dump that could be restored by booting from the installation disk and then recopying the dump to the Mac HD. I haven't looked at this problem in a couple of years, and forgot to look for SuperDuper in my apps. Thanks for reminding me. The fact that I could follow incomplete MAC Help information on setting up a RAID system, and permanently make a partition of my Mac HD unmountable without erasing and reformatting the whole HD, put me off for a long time. I bought an old, early version of Retrospect once, and I don't recall that it worked very well.
PowerPC (Motorola 68000-series uP) code is written in bits, bytes, words and double words to be stored in memory. So long as you have a suitable conversion process, it doesn't matter to what medium or format you dump either the memory or HD. I don't think anyone would want to, but you could copy and recover everything on a HD to and from old-fashioned inefficient 7-track binary coded decimal magnetic tape with a suitable conversion process. The FAT32 and MAC Journaled formats encode the same information with different headers, byte order, checksums, etc. That's why I can download an application disk image file (*.dmg) to my PC, copy it to a flash drive, and copy that to my MAC, and expect it to unpack the app correctly.
If one cannot copy Mac HD information to FAT32, it's only because the Apple OS X creators did not bother to make the appropriate conversion process available to users. As I recall it, this way of thinking advanced as computers changed from professional tools to consumer toys. Basic and necessary tools got dropped in favor of new and improved flashy bells and whistles to chum for consumer dollars. Even scientific applications have suffered on occasion.
In the old mainframe days, no computer company could have gotten away with failing to provide for a way to back up the system. They simply crashed too often, even from things like power company transients and insects in the machine. I have long suspected that Apple made some kind of under the table deals with developers to let them make and sell the system tools that Apple should have provided. This has not been to our benefit.