10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive

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Thu, Jan 24 2008 at 7:30AM PST • Contributed by: jbarley

Early on after Leopard was released, I followed this tip on how to make a small partition on my Time Machine (TM) drive and clone a copy of my install DVD to it. The point here was to have faster access to the restore feature of TM, without the need to locate and boot from your install DVD. This worked well, but I've since discovered an even simpler method which does not necessitate the need to partition the TM drive.

Starting with a clean, newly-formatted TM drive, use Disk Utility and do a restore (source: Install DVD; Destination: TM drive). Once the restore has completed, you'll have a bootable TM drive which can be selected on startup by pressing and holding the Option key down. All that's left is to go into TM's preferences and select this drive for your TM backups.

Simple, quick, and works like a charm, without the need to partition the drive.

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10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: fefo on Thu, Jan 24 2008 at 8:21AM PST

I, maybe wrong, thought that TM used the whole disk to perform backups. If so, once selected as the TM volume it would overwrite the restored DVD image. Am I correct?

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: joab on Thu, Jan 24 2008 at 8:28AM PST

You can have other things on the same drive as TM, sure. I have my Aperture vault on it for example.

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: Timmargh on Thu, Jan 24 2008 at 8:31AM PST

Time Machine will use all available space but it won't overwrite other non-Time Machine files on the same drive/partition.

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: macavenger on Thu, Jan 24 2008 at 8:33AM PST

No, TM won't overwrite any data already on the disk. It only uses all available space on the drive. Actually, in my experience so far, even that isn't quite accurate. I've been running it since about a week or so after 10.5 came out, and the space used by time machine appears to be holding fairly steady at about 10 GB more than the space used on the drive it is backing up, far less than the available space on the TM drive. Course, my files are relative static- if you change a lot of files, especially big ones, it would doubtless use more space, but probably still not gobs more.

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Aluminum iMac 20" 2.4 GHz/3GB/300GB HD

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: fefo on Fri, Jan 25 2008 at 12:13AM PST

Ok, thank you all for the replies. I've an iMac 20" with a 250Gb disk, and another 500Gb USB disk (half of it filled with music & stuff) that was afraid to use 'cause of what I thought TM did.
Anyway, I'll have to free some more Gb off of the USB disk.

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Fefo

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: jbarley on Thu, Jan 24 2008 at 8:30AM PST

Time Machine creates a folder on the TM drive called "Backups.backupdb",
this is where all TM related stuff resides.
Even if or when TM does fill the drive it does so by filling all the "unused" disk space, never overwriting other existing data.

Restore DVD without formatting first?
Authored by: joab on Thu, Jan 24 2008 at 8:40AM PST

Can I somehow restore the install DVD to a firewire drive without formatting it first? I have files on it that I don't want to lose.

Restore DVD without formatting first?
Authored by: robogobo on Thu, Jan 24 2008 at 5:51PM PST

no. a restore will erase the partition.

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: emax on Thu, Jan 24 2008 at 8:41AM PST

As others have commented, Time Machine won't overwrite your OS info. And it may not fill the entire hard drive. But if it does nearly fill the hard drive, OS X will have a difficult, if not impossible time booting.

You always need some free space on your boot volume that the os can use for swap.

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: joab on Thu, Jan 24 2008 at 8:45AM PST

I don't think this hint is about booting an actual Mac OS X system, bur rather just the installer, which comes on a DVD that is read-only anyway so there shouldn't be a problem with swap.

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: jbarley on Thu, Jan 24 2008 at 4:16PM PST

You are spot on, I probably could have made this clearer in my original post.

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: georgl on Thu, Jan 24 2008 at 9:35AM PST

I thinks thats the (almost) only way Time Machine is really usefull. The main reason for data loss (and the need for a backup) in my case until now was hard drive failure.

So I need a harddrive from which I can boot and continue working. Actually ... I use super duper, which safes you from the hassle of reinstalling everything.

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: Felix on Thu, Jan 24 2008 at 9:59AM PST

>>Actually ... I use super duper, which safes you from the hassle of reinstalling everything.

I doubt that since SuperDuper is not (yet) compatible with Leopard. If you are able to make a bootable backup with SuperDuper and OS 10.5.1, please pass your method on to the developer, Dave Nanian. He's been feverishly working on a compatible SuperDuper since the Leopard release date.

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: georgl on Thu, Jan 24 2008 at 12:19PM PST

Hi, sorry, that wasn't clear:

I am still on Tiger, and one of the reasons is that SuperDuper doesn't work on Leopard + I am a bit paranoid about backups after some bad experience.

For this reason the Hint about making the TM drive bootable was a very good one.

However, I might stay on Tiger, because I like the fuzzlessness and ease of use of SuperDuper. Its good to know, that a lot can happen, and you just have to plug in (or screw in) your external harddrive

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: reidjazz on Thu, Jan 24 2008 at 10:05AM PST

I've been using SuperDuper! for about a year now, doing a nightly, bootable clone of my main internal drive to another internal drive. I also have my machine wake up every morning at 3am, let the UNIX routines do their thing, then via an Applescript, backup my critical files to one of a series of 14 DVDs (2 week rotation) so that I've got a 2 week span to go back to, if needed.

Works for me.

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"When you're finished learning, you're finished."

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: RetroSpaceman on Thu, Jan 24 2008 at 10:15AM PST

You can use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the install DVD to your Time Machine drive if you don't want to reformat. Just make sure nothing at the root level of your Time Machine drive is named the same as any of the root level of the install DVD. You can see what these are once you launch Carbon Copy Cloner. I tried it and it worked without a hitch. I avoided having to shuffle 200GB of data already stored on the Time Machine drive.

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: dashard on Fri, Jan 25 2008 at 8:10AM PST

You can use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the install DVD to your Time Machine drive if you don't want to reformat. Just make sure nothing at the root level of your Time Machine drive is named the same as any of the root level of the install DVD. You can see what these are once you launch Carbon Copy Cloner. I tried it and it worked without a hitch. I avoided having to shuffle 200GB of data already stored on the Time Machine drive.

That's an excellent hint all on its own. Well done.
Didn't think about that when I read the earlier question about Disk Utility.

Well done.

[ Reply to This | # ]

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: barryf on Fri, Jan 25 2008 at 11:57AM PST

RetroSpaceman --

This seems like a great idea, so I gave it a while, using CCC to copy my Tiger Install DVD onto an existing volume that contains both my current TM backups folder and some other folders that I use for backing up things like my Parallels disk image that I don't want TM to deal with.

BUT... when I re-booted with the option key held down I was offered my TM drive as a start-up option. I got to the point where I had a grey screen with the spinning "clock" thingy, but it spun and spun and never got to the installer's welcome screen.

Any ideas? Did I miss a step that should be completed after running CCC?

Thanks,

-Barry

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: barryjaylevine on Fri, Jan 25 2008 at 3:07PM PST

Wonder if the HD isn't initialized properly (old vs. GUID)?

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Two things in this world aren't overrated: Macintosh and Lemon Meringue Pie.

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: gadgetdoctor on Sat, Jan 26 2008 at 8:50AM PST

I've had exactly the same failure after copying the DVD to a Lacie Firewire disk with CCC. Grey spin stays for as long as I can be bothered to wait until I power down.

Drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Apple_HFS with GUID.

No idea why this won't work. I have another drive like this with a dedicated partition that I use with SuperDuper (I'm still running Tiger).

GadgetDoctor

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: Casemon on Tue, Apr 29 2008 at 12:04AM PDT

Interesting tip. I tried this on my time machine volume and was able to successfully boot from the volume into the installer without losing my time machine backups (2 machines). The problem is when I select Restore from Time Machine the time machine backups do not appear on the list; it just keeps searching and searching...

any ideas on a work around? Would love for this solution to work without a hitch.

How do I clone Install Disks to TM drive?
Authored by: cdarsey on Sat, Feb 2 2008 at 7:38PM PST

I've read over the comments here and the referenced hint, yet both seem to assume one Install disk, not two. If it were one, I could see it simply easy to restore/copy the Install disk to the new drive. My assumption is that restoring the 2nd Install disk would destroy the contents of the 1st disk on the new drive. Am I wrong here? I confess I haven't checked the 2nd DVD to see if the contents are in separate directories. I would prefer to use the Disk Utility, though I have SuperDuper, also.

A follow-up question would be whether I need to manually create a boot block (make bootable) on the new drive after I've restored the Install disks to it?

Thanks.

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: bobbabe on Sun, Mar 9 2008 at 4:54PM PDT

One user posted a very interesting question. Two install discs are provided with the new system. How is the installation done in this case?

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: morespace54 on Mon, Mar 10 2008 at 2:15PM PDT

I think the O.P. was talking about a retail version of OS 10.5 (which comes on one DVD-DL).

If you try to do this with the CDs/DVDs provided with your computer (Restore Softwares DVD, etc.) you will probably have to "trim" down the DVD to get only the System Install (extract the System Installer and not the iApps and cie).

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: pgflmacrob on Sat, Jun 28 2008 at 10:18AM PDT

I,m trying this technique. I have been using a Time Capsule Time machine for regular MacAir Time Machine backups and using it as a place to store files for transfer (overflow from my old large Tiger Macbook). I am willing to scape all this ( I have an extra backup.)

1) why doesn't disk utility see the time machine time capsule disk.
2) how does one go back and make Time Capsule a virgin time machine disk?

No need to restore to a clean partition
Authored by: mamby on Sun, Dec 28 2008 at 9:25AM PST

maybe this hint is too old, and apple has since changed the way Disk Utility works, but I tried restoring the installation DVD to a not empty partition, and it worked perfectly without erasing a thing.

Am I missing anything?

10.5: Make a bootable Time Machine backup drive
Authored by: beeflin on Sun, Dec 28 2008 at 2:39PM PST

I have had no problems with a 2 disk install. My Time Machine drive now contains the following: various invisible Unix items; the "Install Mac OS X and Bundled Software" app; an alias to "Install Bundled Software Only"; and folders named "Instructions", Xcode Tools", "Optional Installs" & "Backups.backupdb" - the last-named being, of course, my Time Machine backup folder.

I can boot from it, restore from it, whatever - nothing overwritten or broken.

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Steve Rogers, The Difference Engine
http://www.difference-engine.co.uk

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