Bootable Time Machine Backup
2-Feb, 2008
Apple’s Time Machine is a major selling feature their new operating system, Leopard. Every hour, every day, an incremental backup of your Mac is made automatically as long as your backup drive is attached to your Mac. There have been several tips on how to make a bootable Time Machine backup drive, but I felt a good step-by-step was missing…so I am writing one. My hope is to help those that are new to Macs, formatting a drive, backing up data [you know who you are], and using Time Machine.
The first thing you’ll need is a FireWire external drive, which is bootable for all Macs, for your backups. Only Intel Macs can boot from an external, USB drive (correct me if I’m wrong). I recommend the OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro or the LaCie d2 Quadra 500GB drive. You don’t need a FireWire drive to use Time Machine or backup your data—a USB drive will work fine, but if your current Mac OSX installation gets corrupted or your hard drive starts sounding like a cappuccino machine [signaling an imminent meltdown], it’s nice to have a current bootable backup of all your stuff.
Formatting the Drive
Most drives come already formatted, but to make sure the drive is bootable on your Intel Mac, you need to format the drive with the proper partition table. Intel-based Macintosh computers can boot Mac OSX from an APM disk or GUID Partition Table disk, while PowerPC-based systems can boot Mac OS from an APM disk only. If you are reformatting a drive that already has data on it, be sure to back up the data to another drive, as the one you will be using for this purpose will be wiped completely clean.
- Plug in your drive and open the Disk Utility program located in the Applications > Utilities folder.
- Select the FireWire drive icon in the left-hand side of the Disk Utility window and click on the Partition tab.
- Set up the number of partitions using the “+/-” buttons or the drop-down list under the words “Volume Scheme.” If you’re not sure, one partition is all you need.
- Give the partition a name.
- Click the Options button, select the GUID Partition Table radio button, and click OK.
- Click Apply, then Partition.
- The new partition(s) should appear under the main drive icon in the left-hand side of the Disk Utility window.
Making the Bootable OSX Backup Drive
What makes Time Machine so nice is that you can put other data, photos, music, movies, etc. on the same drive [and partition] as your Time Machine backup. That’s because Time Machine creates a separate, unique backup folder for your computer, which also means you can backup multiple Macs [with Time Machine] using the same drive. In other words, multiple partitions are not needed. Excellent! What if, for some reason, your internal and optical drive fail? What if you lose or damage your Mac OSX Leopard DVD? Oh, the humanity! This next step tells you how to put a “clone” of your Mac OSX Leopard DVD onto the bootable FireWire drive.
- Open the Disk Utility program located in the Applications > Utilities folder.
- Pop in your Leopard installation DVD, select the DVD icon in the left-hand side of the Disk Utility window that says “Mac OSX Install DVD,” and click on the Restore tab near the top of the window.
- Simply drag the Mac OSX Install DVD icon to the source field. Then, drag the icon of the partition on which you wish to restore the Leopard DVD to the destination field. Do NOT drag the main drive icon.
- Click the Restore button to put a fresh, bootable copy of the Leopard installation DVD onto your backup drive. The process takes about 30 minutes.
Setting Up Time Machine
- Click on the System Preferences icon in your dock.
- Click on the Time Machine icon, turn on Time Machine and select your newly formatted backup drive.
- Recommended: Click on Options and include any very large files (5+ Gb) that you do NOT want backed up by Time Machine (see “Excluding Large Files” below).
- Time Machine will do its thang!
Excluding Large Files
You may want Time Machine to exclude very large files, like Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion image files. These image files represent the virtual machine you have installed and can be quite large [tens of GB]. Every time you use your virtual machine, the image file is modified, thus changing the time stamp of the file. Time Machine sees this file as new during the next backup cycle and will therefor do what it’s supposed to do…back it up. If you use Parallels or VMWare Fusion often and do not exclude the image file from Time Machine backups, several things will happen: (1) you may run out of disk space very quickly, depending on the size of your backup drive, (2) the number of sequential backups that can fit on your drive will be limited, and (3) each backup cycle may take a very long time.
Going Back in Time
It’s not a DeLorean and it can’t take you back to November 5, 1955, but once Time Machine is done with its first backup cycle, you will now have a bootable Time Machine backup drive, which acts as an installation drive for Mac OSX AND contains sequential backups of all your stuff. If you look at the files on your backup drive, you will notice the Time Machine data and your other files happily coexist, on the same partition, on the same drive. How do you restore your files? Simply open the Time Machine application [not the preferences] and use the arrows or mouse scroll wheel to navigate through the backup cycles…going back in time. Simply find the files or folders you want to restore and click the Restore button in the bottom-right corner.
Need to restore everything? You don’t need the installation DVD anymore. Boot from your the external FireWire drive by pressing and holding the Option key down during startup. You should see a Mac-like OSX desktop. Select Utilities > Restore System from Backup… from the menu bar. Select your backup drive, the date from which you want to backup, and then click restore.
Want more? Feel free to check out Time Machine Editor, a free app that lets you change the default one-hour backup interval of Time Machine. Don’t like Time Machine? I recommend Shirt Pocket’s SuperDuper! Do you want to safely wipe your drive clean before selling your computer?
