[X4U] Booting from external backup drive

[Daly Jessup]

At 10:31 AM -0500 10/13/07, Michael Elliott wrote:
>There is a lot more to a disc being bootable 
>than it used to be in the OS9 days, when you 
>only needed a Finder file and some basic System 
>files in a folder at the root of the drive.
>
>In OSX, there are many interdependencies that 
>have to be set.  So simply backing up the folder 
>structure from one disk to another won't do it.
>
>However, Dèjà Vu's website does indicate that it 
>should be able to create bootable disk clones.
>
>I'm assuming that you have explored all of the 
>program's preferences to make sure that there 
>isn't a "make bootable" button somewhere, like 
>there used to be in Carbon Copy Cloner?

Google searching leads me to believe that DejaVu 
does not  make bootable backups. For instance, 
from Roxio's forums: 
<http://forums.support.roxio.com/lofiversion/index.php/t4647.html>

I strongly suggest that the original poster 
explore SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner for this 
purpose.  I am not very familiar with Carbon Copy 
Cloner, but I know for sure that SuperDuper lets 
you write bootable backups, and lets you create 
schedules for the backups. And I have NEVER had a 
clone fail to be bootable except once, and that 
time, repairing permissions on the external drive 
resolved the issue immediately. Plus you can do 
"smart updates" to the clone, so that in the 
future, the backups are MUCH faster than the 
original full clone.

I actually do a full clone of my drive to one 
external once a week, and a "smart update" to a 
different external every week. So far, so good.

For all I know, Carbon  Copy Cloner is just as good, and it's free.

I understood from your original post that you are 
backing up to a Firewire drive. You should be 
able to easily make a bootable backup, if you use 
the right software.

Daly
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