A backup of any Mac is like capturing a moment in time; it creates an 'image' or 'snapshot' of your Mac at the time of the backup. It captures all of the data, files, folders, and other info on your Mac, and saves it in a compressed file you can use to boot to or reference later on. Well Time Machine will back up your Mac and it comes with the Mac or you could back up using Disk Utility. Open Disk Utility and select New - Image From Folder from the file menu, point it to your users folder and save to an external drive. That are also 3rd party backup utilities.
- Backup And Restore Mac
- Backup Mac Settings Software
- Backup Mac Settings Software
- Backup Mac Settings
- Backup Mac To Cloud
An option would have been to first partition the external drive using Apple's Disk Utility with two partitions: one for the Mac and one for Windows/PC. Then you could the same drive for both platforms.
However, that might not be best option. It would be best to dedicate an external drive exclusively to Time Machine. This would mean you would have to backup incrementally unless you have available ports that you can dedicate to each drive (depending on the external drive being either firewire or USB.) If you can dedicate a drive to a port, the Time Machine drive will back up per its settings automatically. Not sure what you're using to backup the Windows side.
Since you mention you have a MacBook Air, its uncertain how you're connecting as the Air has no USB or Firewire ports..
Sep 16, 2010 2:03 PM
Ever experienced a hard disk failure and then to realised you have not backed up a single file since forever?
Recently, one of my team member's iMac crashed. It was shut down but was never able to boot up ever since. Turn on the Mac, the Apple logo flashes and the progress bar moves. And boom, it shuts down automatically.
Enter Recovery Mode
Boot up your Mac and press CTRL + R before the Apple logo to enter recovery mode.
My first move is do a quick fix to the hard disk. I launched Disk Utility in Recovery Mode and did a disk repair. But disk repair could not be completed. In the midst of the process, it displayed a message citing an input/output error. 1password 7 3 1 cr2 converter.
Backup options in Recovery Mode
Now, we are talking about backing up your hard drive in recovery mode. Time machine is out of the question here.
TLDR; I eventually went with backing up the files via the cp command – a simple copy and paste available in all UNIX based machines. It worked perfectly! I first used use the dd command – a sector by sector backup tool, but the files inside the recovered hard disk were seemingly damaged. Target Disk Mode was not available and Disk Utility failed for me.
1. Target Disk Mode
This is probably the easiest method. Target Disk Mode lets you access and backup your files from another Mac, as if there are on an external hard disk. However, you would need a Thunderbolt 2/FireWire cable and another Mac.
Simply connect your two machines via the cable, restart your non-working Mac and boot it up in Target Disk Mode by pressing on the T key.
In my case, we didn't have the cable, so this option was out.
2. Disk Utility
The idea here is to create an image of my Mac using Disk Utility and save it on my external hard disk.
For me, after running the imaging process started for a few minutes, about 10%, it stopped. Disk Utility displayed a message, 'Unable to create Macintosh HD.dmg. (Input/output error)'.
3. DD UNIX Command
After much research on the web, I came across a third option – the dd command tool. Compared to Disk Utility, this is a much more ancient tool and is only available via the Terminal.
This is the command, which I got from AskDifferent, where if=/dev/disk0 refers to the source that dd is cloning from and of/=dev/disk2 is the destination. I don't know much about setting the right byte sector, so I left it as bs=128m.
In order to know which is your Macintosh HD and which disk is your external hard disk, you would need to get the identifiers via the diskutil tool.
Backup And Restore Mac
In you existing Terminal session or open a new tab for a new session, enter the command diskutil list and all the drives attached to your Mac will show up in a nicely formatted way.
From the list you can identify which hard disk you will be accessing.
Along the way while I was using dd, there are some other things you may encounter, such as resource busy message, or you might just be wondering what's the progress of the cloning. I've shared them below.
Resource Busy
If you encounter resource busy message like this, you may need to unmount your disk. Enter diskutil unmount /dev/disk5 in your terminal.
Checking progress of dd
Here's how to check if your dd is still running, enter kill -INFO $PID, or simply press CTRL + T https://hereaup596.weebly.com/best-free-multitrack-recording-software.html.
Keep your Mac awake with caffeinate
This prevents your Mac to sleep, while you recover your hard disk. Strangely, this command didn't work for me. The iMac still sleeps, or at least the display is still being turned off from time to time.
- Open a new tab in Terminal with
CTRL+T Enter
caffeinate &
To disable it, enter killall caffeinate. This command only works with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and above.
4. ddrescue UNIX Command
While dd runs, I found another tool, ddrescue – which is made for data recovery purposes.
Learn how to use ddrescue at Learn UNIX.
Post Backup
After running the dd command for almost 48 hours, the cloning process has finally completed. Happy and excited, I took the backup drive and plug it into a working Mac and I saw this message.
Scary. But I didn't care and proceed to check out the files inside. All was good, every file and folder was cloned. I tried to open one of the image file and I got a 'The file could not be opened error…' message.
Backup Mac Settings Software
That was the end of it. I couldn't figure what I went wrong. Was it a wrong parameters when I executed the dd command or was it simply bad sectors in the hard disk.
5. cp – UNIX command
Bitdefender virus scanner plus. After that nasty dd experience, I sought a simpler solution. Just copy and paste!
This is the command, where /Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/user-name is the source and /Volumes/Backup is the destination. The parameter -r means to copy recursively including the files inside each subdirectory. -v is to enable verbose mode, so that I can see all the details while the command is running.
Backup Mac Settings Software
For more other parameter options, head to Tutorials Point.
cp is a life saver
You may notice that I set the source path as my home folder instead of the root folder. I figured that the important files are all inside my Desktop, Downloads, Documents, the rest are already synced to the cloud.
Backup Mac Settings
If you're like me, save yourself time, skip the full backup. My goal was to do a full system backup so that I can quickly restore the Mac back online. In my case, the dd command took 48 hours to clone the entire 1TB worth of data, while backing up the selected files and folders worth 120 GB only took 2 hours.
As it turns out, it was faster to restore my home folder, reinstall the Mac OS and all other apps. It was all complete in about 4 hours.
Backup Mac To Cloud
cp is a life saver.
