Approaches for recovering from fatal HDD failure on Macbook Pro

[texxter]

Yesterday I got my spanking new Macbook Pro computer - I have never seen a laptop as beautiful and so nicely manufactured! The unibody aluminum body is a piece of art! But I digress....

I am planning my disaster recovery approach for this machine. I downloaded Carbon Copy, a tool similar to SuperDuper. I connected an older 160Gb USB drive to the Macbook and I formatted it to be bootable. Then I used Carbon Copy to make a clone of the Macintosh HDD device. I then tested it by booting from it, and it worked flawlessly. The shortcoming is that the external drive is not a notebook drive, so I can't take it out of the enclosure and stick it in the Macbook Pro and start using it as the new Macintosh HDD. So my plan is, now that I know I can get this identical clone of my HDD, is to buy a 500Gb notebook HDD, stick it in an enclosure, make it bootable and clone the internal HDD to it. If the internall HDD crashes, I take the external drive and make it internal, and get a replacement for the external enclosure.

My question to you, Mac experts, is, how do you approach replacing a failed HDD with minimum pain and disruption? I want to avoid installing from the recovery CD, reinstalling apps and all that jazz. My approach will work, but it requires me to spend $100 on a notebook drive. Any better approaches?

I am not concerned about image data, only about catastrophic HDD failure where the OS and apps are installed.

Thanks

[srwatters]

Take your clone drive and boot from it, then use CC to clone back to the new internal drive.

Think simple. It's hard to unlearn the ways of Redmond...

[texxter]

Scott, thanks. Yes, this makes sense - once I am booted off the USB drive I can simply format the new internal drive as a bootable disk and copy back from the external drive. I just need to test CC to trust it that I'll do that well. I think I will connect a second external drive, boot from the first external drive, and then clone it to the second drive, followed by booting from this second drive. This will allow me to test the scenario without touching my new internal hard drive.

I appreciate your suggestion!

[srwatters]

You're still working too hard. OS X can be cloned while running with no ill effects. You will find that using firewire 800 will be considerably faster and is the native interface on the new MacBook Pro. At least that's what I use...

[Brains]

I get a kick out of the whole "trust" stuff. We've learned over the Windows years never to trust that something which works once -- because it may not work the same the second time.

I just did basically the same thing you're talking about Paco, but as an upgrade. I replaced my 5400rpm drive with a 7200rpm one, and just used CC to push everything across to the new drive in an external case. Swapped out the drive, and I was up and running. Easiest upgrade ever.

[texxter]

Thanks, Brian. Yes, that is the path of least resistance to me, just wanted to avoid buying a new drive for disaster recovery when I have older drives lying around that will work just fine. I'll do the testing I mentioned above for my peace of mind, and set up a schedule to do the disaster backups on a regular basis.

[srwatters]

Don't automatically overlook Time Machine. I use it on both my desktop and MacBook Pro. It will also restore a bootable system on a new drive. You just boot from the OS X DVD and select the Time Machine restore mode. Once again think simple and trust in Steve

[texxter]

I dont trust software too much no matter who writes it Paranoia has saved me a couple of times, and when I am not paranoid bad things happen.

[KenJulio]

Originally Posted by srwatters

Don't automatically overlook Time Machine. I use it on both my desktop and MacBook Pro. It will also restore a bootable system on a new drive. You just boot from the OS X DVD and select the Time Machine restore mode. Once again think simple and trust in Steve

I was going to mention Time Machine. I recently purchased an iMac to go along with the MBP and simply did a Time Machine backup on the MBP, when I was done with it, I connected that external harddrive to the iMac and did a restore.

It brought in all the apps and data which was backed up on the MBP. No entering of serial numbers, no reconfiguring of settings.

[dmora]

i want to figure out a way to clone my desktop to my laptop... :(

Basically i want any change i do on one to be mirrored to the other as if im out in the field or in class or something on the laptop. I havent figured out how to do that but havent really researched it much.

I just got a new 750gb hd for backing up stuff such as my photos.

[texxter]

Originally Posted by dmora

i want to figure out a way to clone my desktop to my laptop... :(

Basically i want any change i do on one to be mirrored to the other as if im out in the field or in class or something on the laptop. I havent figured out how to do that but havent really researched it much.

I just got a new 750gb hd for backing up stuff such as my photos.

https://www.mesh.com/ may be what you're looking for.