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Old 05-06-2005, 08:22 PM
GoOnSafari GoOnSafari is offline
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: CA and Tanzania, depending on time of the year
Posts: 2
Cool Cloning iMac to Powerbook

I use a G5 iMac as my main computer, most of the year. I use a powerbook g4 Titanium for half the year.

Here is what I'd like to do, and wonder if it will work.

There is currently nothing on the powerbook that is not on the iMac. There are things on the iMac that are not on the powerbook. I have about 30gb of files and stuff on the iMac and a 60gb drive in the powerbook, so there should be plenty of room on it. Presently I manually copy stuff I need over to the powerbook from time to time to sync them (such as delete all stored mail in Mail and then import my mail file from the iMac and copy over documents folder).

What I would like to do, before leaving for my annual 6 months in Africa is connect the two macs (either by firewire or ?, that is part of the question). Use SuperDuper to copy/clone the entire iMac to the Powerbook, overwriting the files on the powerbook with the OS and files on the iMac. Would I just erase and copy or make a disk image and restore?

Will it work? Can I do it in reverse when I return from Africa as I will then have things on the powerbook that need to be on the iMac? Will I need to reinstall any software or enter any product codes (Dreamweaver, MS Office, etc., Mailboxes, etc)? I'm using OS X (10.3.9) on both macs now.

I routinely backup the entire iMac drive to an external firewire drive and when I boot from that things seem to work but was not sure if it would work with the powerbook. I haven't tested all apps from there so not 100% sure it "works" that way.

Is there some other strategy that would be better?

Step by step help would be much appreciated, while I am technically proficient, I'd rather not learn from mistakes if I can help it.

Peg
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