Mac OS X Power Hound, Second Edition

Other Programs

As you gain experience with Mac OS X, you may find other things you wish to do that can’t be handled by the Apple programs and utilities. For example, you may want a simpler way to copy your existing Mac OS X installation to a new hard drive, or you may want to run a more powerful FTP server. The following programs can solve these problems—and many more.

Creating a Bootable Backup

Everyone agrees that backing up your work is massively important, and yet many people find it too difficult or time-consuming to do regularly. However, if you have an external hard drive (or a spare partition on your main one), Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) can take care of the difficult part (http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html). This program copies your entire hard drive onto another disk, thereby creating an exact mirror image. As Figure 14-16 illustrates, CCC has a very simple interface.

Figure 14-16. Specify the existing copy of Mac OS X in the Source Disk box and identify the destination disk in the Target Disk box. Click the small lock icon and enter your admin password, then click Clone. CCC is now off to the races. Soon you’ll have an exact duplicate of your existing drive.

CCC can even keep two disks synchronized (which means that adding a file to your main hard drive automatically adds it in the same place on your backup drive). CCC does this with a Unix tool called psync and offers ...