I'm thinking a virtual Lion could make a nice sandbox for testing, and if I
screw something up I can just delete the virtual machine and set up a new
one.
-----Original Message-----
From: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com
[mailto:macvisionaries@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Paul Erkens
Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2011 2:23 PM
To: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Questionabout Super Doopper and external drives
Hi Bill Holton,
Both sandboxing and running Lion inside vm fusion requires some system
maintanance. Why would you want to run lion as a virtual machine by the way?
Why not just natively?
Paul.
On Sep 14, 2011, at 8:07 PM, Bill Holton wrote:
Thanks for these great instructions. It looks like the new version of VM
Fusion will allow me to run Lion as a virtual machine, which sounds like
it
will be easier than sandboxing. But I do need to partition and format my
coming USB HD so the instructions are no less appreciated.
Thanks.
-----Original Message-----
From: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com
[mailto:macvisionaries@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Paul Erkens
Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2011 1:13 PM
To: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Questionabout Super Doopper and external drives
Hi Bill Holton,
You can repartition an external drive, and create both a fat32 windows
partition and a mac os 10 extended journaled one with mac disk utility.
You
can then use the fat32 partition to share data between windows and the
mac,
and you can use the os10 partition to maintain a backup of everything on
your mac. Let's begin by looking at how to resize your macintosh hd
partition and have a sandbox beside it.
It involves a few steps which I'll describe below. Not key by key though.
I'll assume that you have some mac knowledge, but just don't know where to
go yet, and in what order. Here you go.
First open disk utility, to carefully inspect your current configuration
so
that you know what you will be changing..
To do this, Go into the finder, say, your desktop, and press command shift
u
from there. This will open your utilities folder. Here, find disk utility
dot app, and open it.
In the disk table on the left, interact, and look at your current disk
configuration. You need to know a few things before you go do something
here. A disk is just a disk, and you cannot use it directly. It needs to
have a partition to hold the file system, inside of which you can store
files. There are many file systems, one of them is fat32, and another is
mac
os10 extended journaled. A filesystem lives inside a partition, so the
partition is the container for the file system on the disk. From the disk
perspective, you first have an empty disk. Then you create a partition on
the disk, spanning all or only part of the disk size. As you are creating
the new partition, you must choose which file system is going to live
inside
it, because The partition must be formatted for use with the type of file
system that you want to use. In other words, the way you format your
partition, becomes a property of the partition. So, on your external usb
drive, you can have a fat32 partition, and a mac os10 partition, and you
can
have 2 separate mac os 10 extended journaled partitions on your internal
mac
hard drive. In both cases, You then just allocate one bit to the first
partition, and the rest of the disk space to the other. You do this by
setting the size text fields inside disk utility. See below.
Once inside disk utility on the mac, you will see your hard disk as the
brand of physical disk inside the machine, for example Hitachi 500gb. This
item in the disk table is usually expanded, meaning there can be something
inside it. And indeed, there is. It's your macintosh hd partition,
formatted
as mac os10 extended journaled, with a size of your entire disk.
What you want to have, is not 1 big partition of 500 or 320 gb, what have
you, but you would like to shrink the os10 partition and make it 20 gb
smaller. You will use these 20 gigabytes for the sandbox partition. This
can
be done, but it can't be done non-destructively. In other words: resizing
your partitions with disk utility is indeed destructive, because it will
destroy all data on the disk. In all partitions.
What you can do is back up everything, then recreate your macintosh hd
partition 20 gb smaller, create a sandbocx partition beside it, and then
restore your data. This is painless, as I experienced yesterday and today.
You can use super duper. If you have one, take an external usb hard disk
with as much space as you have on your internal hard drive in your mac.
Your
external disk can of course be larger, but you will need at most the size
of
your mac drive, if you have it filled up. Super duper can create a backup
of
your entire system, all apps, system files, preferences and all that. Even
the unregistered version of super duper does it without restriction and
will
make the usb backup disk bootable too. Once everything is backed up, you
can
restart your mac and boot off of the external disk.
Note: If you have no other usb disks connected other than your external
backup hard disk, and as long as you only have 1 partition on the mac
drive,
you can boot from the usb disk by turning on your mac, and during the
startup sound, hold down the option key for some 10 seconds or so. Release
it, and you will be in a menu. The cursor is on macintosh hd, to boot
from.
Arrow left once, hit enter, and you will instead boot from the usb drive.
It
takes longer but it works. End of note.
When booted from the external drive, you have your entire system as usual.
Voice over as well. Because everything was backed up, both disk utility
and
super duper are on this external drive too. So now, start disk utility and
look at what you have in the disk table. You will see your mac hard drive
and its macintosh hd partition, you will see your external usb disk that
you
are now working from with its partitions, and you may see something called
a
super drive. That is simply your mac's internal cd dvd drive.
Now, You want to repartition your internal mac hard drive into 2 new
partitions: macintosh hd 20 gb smaller, and the sandbox partition being 20
gb in size.
Put the cursor on the mac hard drive itself. Not on macintosh hd which is
the partition inside it. If you now look at the rest of this disk utility
screen, you will find a number of tabs. One of them is the partition tab.
Push it with vo space. The screen changes to show partitioning options.
This screen is self-explanatory, except for one thing. There can be a
scroll
area. First, you need to choose how many partitions you are going to have
in
the new layout. You will find a pop button for this. After you select to
have 2 partitions, a scroll area will appear. It consists of 3 items: the
first partition, a separator and the second partition. Focus on your first
partition inside the scrool area and stop interacting. Now, look left and
right of the scroll area, and you will find places to give the partition
its
size, name, and file system. Then go back to the scrool area again, focus
on
the second partition which is your sandbox, and fill in the details again
for this partition. Then hit apply, let disk utility do its thing, and
then
exit disk utility. Now you have a macintosh hd partition 20 gb smaller,
and
you have your 20 gb sand box partition. Both partitions are in place but
they are empty.
Now, use super duper to restore from your external drive back to macintosh
hd, so that your system is back normal again.
In super duper, choose your external drive in the source pop up button,
choose macintosh hd as the destination in the second pop up button, use
the
backup all files item in the next pop up button, and let it do its thing.
Now, you can boot as usual and nothing should be different. All data is
back
on your drive, inside macintosh hd.
Now for the sand box. Having booted normally, start super duper. Tell it
to
back up from macintosh hd, to the new 20 gb sandbox partition, using the
choice named sandbox shared users as your backup method. Don't use smart
update this time yet. You want to be sure that everything is backed up
from
macintosh hd to the sandbox partition. When done, close super duper. Now
you have your sandbox in place. Forget about it, until you want to test a
new device driver or piece of software.
When that time has come, you will first need to boot from the new sandbox
partition. To do that, either do it using the option key at startup, or go
into system preferences, the item startup disk, and set it to boot from
sandbox. This will hold for all subsequent boot ups, until you change it
back.
Once booted into your sandbox, install the software or drivers and try
them
out. Reboot when you want or need to. Sandbox will automatically be the
booted partition because you did that in system preferences. If you are
satisfied with the new software, you will have to install it a second
time,
but now on to your real macintosh hd partition. Go to system preferences,
change the startup disk back to macintosh hd, reboot, and install your
driver or software.
Note: from time to time, it is a good idea to update your sandbox to
reflect
the state of your ever changing macintosh hd. To do this, use super duper.
Backup from macintosh hd, to sandbox, backup all files, and use smart
update
to bring down the backup time. To turn on smart update, find the options
button on the super duper screen, hit it and select smart update from a
pop
up button. Hit ok to close options and hit copy now. Your sand box is now
up
to date again, ready for the next unknown bit of software you would like
to
have a go at.
Lastly, repartitioning your external drive should now be a snap. If you
have
further questions let me know.
Hth,
Paul.
On Sep 14, 2011, at 3:07 PM, Bill Holton wrote:
Thanks. The sandbox seems like it would also be a more convenient way to
get into the Mac if your main system gets messed up. How hard is it to
repartition your ddrive on the fly?
Also, any suggestions on what I should do with my coming USB drive so I
can
use it both to use SuperDuper and have space to swap it to my Windows PC
to
back it up with a PC backup program?
Thanks.
Bill
-----Original Message-----
From: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com
[mailto:macvisionaries@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Paul Erkens
Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2011 9:04 AM
To: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Questionabout Super Doopper and external drives
Hi Bill, James and others,
Super duper is equal in its functionality as far as backing up and
bootable
backups go. CCC is free. Super duper costs 30 dollars or so. Super duper
has
an extra bit of functionality though, that I really love, now that I
messed
up my system installing the wrong drivers and so on in the past. Super
duper
allows you to create a sand box. A sand box is an entire copy of your mac
os
10 system installation residing on another partition of your hard drive,
that you can use to play around with software updates, system drivers you
install such as mac fuse and others, and you can mess with applications,
before you go ahead and actually install them for real into your main
macintosh hd. If you want to test a new hardware device driver, and you
are
not sure of the outcome, whether or not it is going to disturb you or
something in your system, you can install the new driver inside the
sandbox.
if you find out that everything works just fine inside your second os,
the
sandbox, then you can safely install the new drivers into your real
system.
What super duper does, is that it requires you to repartition your drive
into 2 pieces. One for your normal system, and a 20 gb partition for the
sandbox.
But then, Once that is done, you have the great advantage of testing new
drivers and software inside your sandbox, before taking the plunge to
install them into the daily operating system. If, on the other hand, you
find that the driver is not working for you, is too intrucive or what
ever
reason you may have to discard it, then all you need to do is copy your
clean macintosh hd system files over to the sandbox, replacing the mess
you
created there. Now, you also got rid of the faulty driver in the sandbox.
No matter if you boot from your macintosh hd or from the sandbox
partition,
you always have your documents etc at hand. This is because if you boot
from
macintosh hd, then the documents are accessible as usual. But from the
sandbox, they are reference using symbolic links, so that, even though
the
sandbox is just a copy of the real os, you can access all your private
stuff
from there too. That is wonderful in super duper. You should very
carefully
read the manual though, before you begin sandboxing, so that you are
aware
of what's happening. For example, you should never copy the sandbox back
to
macintosh hd. That makes you loose all your private stuff.
CCC can backup and make the backup bootable, so if you don't need the
sand
box functionality, then ccc is perfect too.
On Sep 13, 2011, at 6:31 PM, Bill Holton wrote:
Hi.
I have a 2 tarabyte drive on its way, and I have a few questions about
Mac
backups.
First, as I seem to recall, with Superdooper you can create a backup in
a
format you can actually boot from, if the system becomes trashed? Is
this
correct? Is SuperDooper the only package that allows this,or does time
Machine, also?
Second question: How would I configure the drive so I can use it to
back
up
my Mac, but also swap it out to my PC to back it up? Guessing I'll need
to
create two partitions? If so, how do I create the correct two using
Tiger?
Thanks.
Bill
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups
"MacVisionaries" group.
To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"MacVisionaries" group.
To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"MacVisionaries" group.
To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"MacVisionaries" group.
To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"MacVisionaries" group.
To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"MacVisionaries" group.
To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"MacVisionaries" group.
To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
