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Backup hackintosh + bootloader with dd (terminal)

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Hi,

I have been looking for methods to FULLY backup my primary hackintosh drive (running 10.11), including the clover EFI partition.

I have combed through the tonymac site, and have seen you can use timemachine, CCC, or super duper, to backup the system disk, but not the EFI partition?

If making "incremental" backups was not an issue for me, couldn't I just clone the entire disk, using dd in terminal?



After running "diskutil list". I see all the necessary partitions are under the disk0 partition.
EFI - disk0s1
apple hfs - disk0s2
apple boot - disk0s3

if I were to run dd, for the entire disk 0...


I.e. "sudo dd if=/dev/disk0 of=/dev/disk1 bs=128m conv=noerror,sync"

Wouldn't that copy my clover EFI boot partition in addition to my OSX drive? Is there anything wrong with doing this?
If I were to go this route, do I need to unmount the system drive to copy it properly?

Thanks
 
Hi,

I have been looking for methods to FULLY backup my primary hackintosh drive (running 10.11), including the clover EFI partition.

I have combed through the tonymac site, and have seen you can use timemachine, CCC, or super duper, to backup the system disk, but not the EFI partition?

If making "incremental" backups was not an issue for me, couldn't I just clone the entire disk, using dd in terminal?



After running "diskutil list". I see all the necessary partitions are under the disk0 partition.
EFI - disk0s1
apple hfs - disk0s2
apple boot - disk0s3

if I were to run dd, for the entire disk 0...


I.e. "sudo dd if=/dev/disk0 of=/dev/disk1 bs=128m conv=noerror,sync"

Wouldn't that copy my clover EFI boot partition in addition to my OSX drive? Is there anything wrong with doing this?
If I were to go this route, do I need to unmount the system drive to copy it properly?

Thanks
Yes, this dd command will clone exactly your source disk that include any hidden partition. the only down side to this method is you have to use the same size drive of your source drive or larger, however if your destination drive is larger, it will clip off the extra space of that Drive and you are not able to use it.
You must start up from the third volume so your source and your destination drive to be free during this process. The benefit of this method is the clone is identical to the original there of it will not have any issue that might happen when you sign into iCloud, iMessage or any other web accounts that remember your computer.
 
You must start up from the third volume so your source and your destination drive to be free during this process.

Thanks for the reply.
I'm doing a 1TB SSD (primary) to 1TB HDD (backup).

Is it a major issue to clone while the disk (osx) is in use?

Also, couldn't I just let the disk get mirrored (despite being in use), so that way I have the complete disk structure, and the EFI partition on the external HDD. And since the disk structure and EFI partition would be on the external disk, I could theoretically write over that OSX partition on the external disk, with a Time machine, CCC or super duper backup ?

Or would that not work?
 
Thanks for the reply.
I'm doing a 1TB SSD (primary) to 1TB HDD (backup).

Is it a major issue to clone while the disk (osx) is in use?

Also, couldn't I just let the disk get mirrored (despite being in use), so that way I have the complete disk structure, and the EFI partition on the external HDD. And since the disk structure and EFI partition would be on the external disk, I could theoretically write over that OSX partition on the external disk, with a Time machine, CCC or super duper backup ?

Or would that not work?
If I remember it correctly, the dd command will not work if one of your source or destination is in use...<It has been a while since i've done it>.... That is the reason why you have to start up from a third volume then unmount your source and the destination drive before dd command. The third volume can be a Mac os install dvd disc or a usb installer thumb drive which it was created when you first install you Hackintosh.
After you had your disk structure mirror then i guest you could use any other application like ccc or super duper to back up, but i haven't tried that yet. I also want to point out that if you stat up with a usb installer thumb drive or a Mac os install dvd disc then you don't have to type "sudo" just start with "dd" and use "rdisk" instead of "disk" it works a bit faster.
 
@TheITBaron I’ve successfully used your method twice.

One was with an UEFI booting El Capitan boot disk from a 250GB to 250GB Samsung SSD. This one was clone and go. Simple and straight forward.

And another was with a 64GB Crucial to 250GB Samsung SSD on a BIOS (Legacy Clover) booting Mojave boot disk. In this case there were two small additional steps. One was even after the EFI dd clone the system wouldn’t boot from the cloned disk. And solved by running the Clover Legacy installer over the cloned EFI partition. The other was APFS size disk size. After the cloning process, the cloned disk still shows the same amount of free space as the original source disk but disk utility shows 1 partition over the new 250GB volume. To get the free space back, in disk utility add a 1M msdos (FAT) partition it will go through the motions as well as expand the first MacOS partition, then delete the newly added msdos partition and you’re done.
 
I sometimes use dd on linux, however when I do, I prefer piping the dd command through pv, which allows me to monitor progress.
sudo dd if=/dev/sda1 | pv | sudo dd of=/dev/sdb1 bs=???
 
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