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Disk Imaging Needed
Authored by: victory on Oct 24, '01 08:28:54PM

Yeah. I agree completely that 10.1 is lacking in terms of a quick recovery solution.

Traditionally the sysadmin philosophy on the Unix side has always been to rely on a recent backup (rather than attempting extensive repair) if the system ever got hosed. It a way it's somewhat regrettable that as the 'largest Unix vendor on the planet' , Apple doesn't offer an easy method to backup their flagship OS.

Thus far every method to backup/restore/move a OSX partition has involved arcane tricks such as moving the files from OS9 then manually correcting links, using the DiskCopy with the Apple Software Restore app (only works if your volume has <2GB of data), etc. And since the BSD subsystem is actually running on top of HFS+, you can't even use the traditional Unix 'dd' method.

What I would give to have a partition imaging app like Norton Ghost for OSX. But who knows, maybe once Retrospect for OSX is done, we'll have just that.



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Disk Imaging Needed
Authored by: Fsckd on Oct 25, '01 10:47:32AM

The answer to the Mac OS X backup problem is simple -- Partition all drives as UFS. Excellent back-up tools (tar, gzip, dump and restore) ship with the OS, but do not function on HFS+. I've gotten excellent performance out of 10.1 on UFS, plus the reliability and flexability one expects from a UNIX system.



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Disk Imaging Needed
Authored by: victory on Oct 25, '01 12:51:51PM

Yes. I agree that UFS is probably the way to go...in the future. Besides simplifying backups and improving performance as it also offers greater security in that you can't muck with it from the OS9 side as you can with an HFS+ partition.

However, the biggest problem at the moment is that there are packages (mostly originating on the Mac side) that break without HFS+'s upper/lowercase filename tolerance. Yeah, I know that UFS filenaming (case-sensitive) is the way that *real* Unix filesystems have always done things, so it's weird to see things breaking when using it. I'm sure work is underway to ensure that all Apple stuff is 'UFS clean' but personally, until then I don't want to have to deal with another potential source of mysterious and unnecessary problems that may come with it. (Remember Classic not working under the OSXPB if installed on an UFS partition?)

On the other hand, maybe I'll give OSX-on-UFS a second try on my home machine.



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Disk Imaging Needed
Authored by: Fsckd on Oct 25, '01 03:01:37PM

Actually, Classic still won't work under UFS. I've actually trashed Classic and it's preferences a long time ago, so I forget about it sometimes. If you really need to run old apps, you're stuck with HFS+.

My feeling is that if Apple intends to keep HFS+ as the default file system, we'll eventually see the Unix tools rewritten to handle the resource forks. Until then, however, I recommend UFS for anyone who doesn't need legacy support.



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