How to make a working IMAGE ofperfect system? What program to use? NoRestor

Question

OK, being a PC guy (sigh) I am used to system restore.
A few things. The other day for no reason iDVD stopped playing sound, for the life of me I could not fix it, garage band played fine....as well as Logic Express, but no for iDVD which leads me to this. I had to reinstall OS and all the software again.
Is there something similar to system restore?
Or, how does one make a working copy of his/her image when it is working great and then use that for the re-install.
I assume from the tiger disc this is where you say use recover image or something like that. What programs (if there is no restore) are there for making a working image of your system? Will toast do it? I don't want a toast image but a DMG image.....after I install FC, iWork, iLife, Garage loops, where looking at 30GB at least, but will do it if it means the next time something goes wrong instead of reinstalling all I have to do is mount this recoverable image!
Thanks again!

Answer 1

Here's what I do. This is my backup routine - seriously.
- Get Info on your main drive, copy down the # of bytes used. Divide by 1024 then by 1024 again. This gives you the number of MB used on your system
- Open Disk Utility. Select FILE > New...> Blank Disk Image
- from the size drop down, select Custom, then enter the MB number you calculated plus about 0.2.
- Save as read/write, no encryption, to an external drive (firewire is more reliable in my experience but USB should work) - use a descriptive name so you know it's a backup. If your image is big, this will take a while as D.Util. writes a file the same size as your main drive.
- Your new disk image will show up in Disk Utility. Verify the bytes available is more than the bytes on your main drive (highlight them in turn and look at the info at the bottom of the D.Util. window)
- Now click the Restore button. Drag your main drive into the Source slot and the mounted disk image into the destination slot. No need to erase destination because you just overwrote those bytes creating the contiguous .DMG file.
- Click Restore and go watch a movie.
When D.U. is done your main drive will now be in a .dmg file. To get your drive back, boot from the install CD, select D.U. from the Utilities menu, restore from the image (click the Image button on the restore screen to mount and browse external drives). This time you put the mounted image file in the source and your main drive in the destination slot. Watch another movie.
I suggest you test this between external drives first in case you think it's black magic. You can then boot from the second restored drive to verify that yes indeed it's a perfect clone and it's bootable (need FW drives since you can't boot from USB). If your restore doesn't work just remember your backup is on that .dmg file and don't give up. But I've never had a problem (knocking on my wooden head).
This is my routine once a month. Between times I backup just changed files as needed. I also have a "clean" configuration of my laptop from the last time I wiped it and re-installed all my apps. That process took 2 days, but when I restore the clean it takes maybe an hour - much better than finding all my disks and serial numbers again, and wasting 2 days.
Let us know if this is helpful,
Ed
iMacG5/2ghz, PBG4/1.67ghz   Mac OS X (10.4.7)   2g/2g RAM, 250g/80g HD, AE, Dvorak