Mac – How to backup OS 9 system files

backupclassic-mac-osfilesystemmac

I have a PowerBook G4 Titanium that I need to wipe to clear the previous user's personal data. It has a password that I don't know but I can still login automatically to OS X upon boot. Not having the administrative password is preventing me from wiping the computer through the options provided by the OS.

I have learned that these older macs come with specific roms and extensions for the older OSs and I would like to back these up. But I understand that this isn't entirely straightforward due to aliasing and resource forks. The OS 9 part of the laptop was never used so it is pristine and a good candidate for being backed up.

How do I do go about backing up all of the necessary files in a way that I can restore them?

I selected the following files on the root partition and dropped then all at once into DropStuff:

Applications (Mac OS 9)/
Desktop (Mac OS 9)/ -> Desktop Folder/
Desktop Folder/
Desktop DB
Desktop DF
System Folder/
Trash/

Is this sufficient to preserve aliases and resources or do I need to do this differently?

I know very little about vintage Mac software and filesystems but I am very experienced with both Windows and Linux. Please feel free to be as technical as you like.

Best Answer

Those are rebuilt automatically if they are missing:

Desktop DB
Desktop DF
Trash

To test it, just use an external disk, copy those files on a HFS partitioned volume, press option on reboot to select the start volume.

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How to backup the iPhoto library to Dropbox or to an external disk

Let me take a stab at actually answering the question.

First of all, do NOT use a FAT32 drive to back up your iPhoto library. The library frequently contains aliases/symlinks, and FAT doesn't support those, so they would either result in duplicate photos (in the best case) or break a bunch of your photos.

I don't think Dropbox has any limitation that would prevent it from backing up any/all normal files you'd store on Mac, which would include filename restrictions. Those would be a dealbreaker for any syncing cloud storage. So I think you can be confident there.

Dropbox seems to handle symlinks by turning them into duplicates. Other than that, people have been moving their libraries over to the Dropbox folder successfully. Here's a post to that effect – and in the comments are some common problems and solutions to this technique.

I've also (through a post on Apple's forums) found an app called Insync which utilises your Google Drive account. They claim to support symlinks … in fact a large part of the draw is that you can create symlinks to anywhere on your computer and direct them to the Insync folder (which then goes to Google Drive). In other words, you should be able to create a link to your iPhoto library and it will make a synced backup, rather than having to actually move the library to a synced folder.

MacOS – Time Machine is skipping files and folders. How to fix

I have the same issue since one of the mavericks updates, not necessarily the .0 version, not sure when exactly it started. I have this issue mostly with one folder: ~/Library/Preferences. I can fix the issue (see below), but 1-3 weeks later the issue is happening again with that folder. I think this folder might be hit often by the bug, cause the prefs-files in there are often changed, I dont know. Anway its a bug! If I should guess, the reason might be a bug in fsevents-daemon (fseventsd), which is responsible for tracking file system changes.

Sometimes I also have other folders than Preferences not backing up anymore, but this happens not that often.

To test which folders are "stuck" and do not backup properly you can:

do a fresh backup and keep the backup volume connected
in Terminal: tmutil compare -n

The terminal command runs 30 mins with my backup of 150 GB size. It helps identifying files which are not in the Latest backup. Be informed, some files might be shown, which are ok to be not backed up.

I also tried touch files, which did not help. What helped, was renaming the parent folder. To fix the issue for a particular folder, e. g. ~/Library/Preferences, I rename the folder twice like:

in Terminal:

sudo mv ~/Library/Preferences ~/Library/PreferenceS
sudo mv ~/Library/PreferenceS ~/Library/Preferences

Note, the last letter s/S at the end. I need sudo for the Preferences folder, cause OSX has set special access rights for that folder. So sudo might not be needed for other folders. After doing so, the files in that folder are backed up correctly again. Problem: the issue is not solved permanently. Unpredictably after 1-3 weeks the issue is back.

Best Answer

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How to backup the iPhoto library to Dropbox or to an external disk

MacOS – Time Machine is skipping files and folders. How to fix

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