Best Way to Back Up?

[lebleu29]

After many hours of tinkering, I've finally got my build working well and I was wondering if anyone had any advice for backing things up.

In the past, installing things or working with Clover Configurator has really messed things up, so moving forward - I'm going to work on getting iMessage working now - I'm worried that any future changes I try to make will cause problems.

Would Time Machine do the trick? Does it back up everything like kext files, etc.?

Is there a way to clone the hard drive via Windows (I've got dual boot working). Is Carbon Copy Cloner the way to go as described in this thread?

Thanks for you help and apologies if I've missed a page on this site where this is discussed in more detail.

 

[nobodynose]

After many hours of tinkering, I've finally got my build working well and I was wondering if anyone had any advice for backing things up.

In the past, installing things or working with Clover Configurator has really messed things up, so moving forward - I'm going to work on getting iMessage working now - I'm worried that any future changes I try to make will cause problems.

Would Time Machine do the trick? Does it back up everything like kext files, etc.?

Is there a way to clone the hard drive via Windows (I've got dual boot working). Is Carbon Copy Cloner the way to go as described in this thread?

Thanks for you help and apologies if I've missed a page on this site where this is discussed in more detail.

Carbon Copy Cloner and a spare external hard drive is probably the easiest way to go. CCC is, I believe, only $30 and worth every penny, and external drives are quite inexpensive as well. Keep in mind that if you have Clover installed on a separate EFI partition (in other words, if you chose UEFI boot for your install), CCC will not backup that EFI partition. What I do is simply mount the EFI partition and copy the entire /EFI/EFI/CLOVER folder to a location on my hard drive before I back it up using CCC, that way I have a full backup of my configuration.

 

[lebleu29]

Awesome. Thanks for the reply.

Used CCC last night and backed up my drive. So, if need be, in the future, I boot from USB, restore backup, and then run Multibeast again to put Clover back on the drive? I could then reboot and restore the EFI partition?

 

[nobodynose]

Awesome. Thanks for the reply.

Used CCC last night and backed up my drive. So, if need be, in the future, I boot from USB, restore backup, and then run Multibeast again to put Clover back on the drive? I could then reboot and restore the EFI partition?

That is correct. You could also install Clover from its standalone installer, though you'd likely end up with a different (newer) version than what you had before, simply because MultiBeast is sometimes a little behind. Clover is so stable now that a slight version increase is unlikely to ever cause any problem.

 

[lebleu29]

Great, thanks for your help.

 

[builtospill]

Nobodynose, After you mount the EFI partition, you copy it to the source (say the desktop) and then carbon copy clone to the backup. Down the road if I need to restore from the backup, whats the easiest way to restore /EFI/EFI/CLOVER folder? Boot the backup off of either the original drive's boot loader, or use my original USB installer's boot loader. Once I'm booted in the backup, re-run Multibeast, mount the EFI partition and copy and paste my backed up /EFI/EFI/CLOVER folders onto EFI partition?

Carbon Copy Cloner and a spare external hard drive is probably the easiest way to go. CCC is, I believe, only $30 and worth every penny, and external drives are quite inexpensive as well. Keep in mind that if you have Clover installed on a separate EFI partition (in other words, if you chose UEFI boot for your install), CCC will not backup that EFI partition. What I do is simply mount the EFI partition and copy the entire /EFI/EFI/CLOVER folder to a location on my hard drive before I back it up using CCC, that way I have a full backup of my configuration.

 

[nobodynose]

Nobodynose, After you mount the EFI partition, you copy it to the source (say the desktop) and then carbon copy clone to the backup. Down the road if I need to restore from the backup, whats the easiest way to restore /EFI/EFI/CLOVER folder? Boot the backup off of either the original drive's boot loader, or use my original USB installer's boot loader. Once I'm booted in the backup, re-run Multibeast, mount the EFI partition and copy and paste my backed up /EFI/EFI/CLOVER folders onto EFI partition?

It depends on the circumstances under which you need to restore from backup. If you do a complete install from scratch, then obviously you'll boot from the USB installer, do the install, run MultiBeast to make sure the latest Clover gets installed and you have the latest kexts, etc., then copy the necessary files from your backed-up CLOVER folder into the new one. "Necessary files" means mainly your config.plist, DSDT and SSDT (if you use them), and any kext files you've installed in CLOVER/kexts/10.11 or CLOVER/kexts/other.

 

[builtospill]

But if I just want to make my clone bootable, after I install Clover back on it, do I just need to overwrite the config.plist from old drive to get my Clover boot settings, or should I copy the whole EFI folder? There are no kexts in the 10.11 or other folder on my current EFI partition.

 

[linuxrox]

CloneZilla is another great option (disk to disk as well as disk to image), backups data and your bootloader. Can't use it for single file restores like you can with Time Machine.

 

[nobodynose]

But if I just want to make my clone bootable, after I install Clover back on it, do I just need to overwrite the config.plist from old drive to get my Clover boot settings, or should I copy the whole EFI folder? There are no kexts in the 10.11 or other folder on my current EFI partition.

In addition to the config.plist, you also need your SSDT.aml (along with SSDT-1.aml, SSDT-2.aml, etc. if you have them) and DSDT.aml (if you have one) from the ACPI/patched folder.