Backing up a Mac OS laptop
It seems easiest to do this by hooking up the laptop using target disk mode:
- Shut down the laptop.
- Boot the laptop into target-mode (hold the T key down).
- Hook up the laptop's fire-wire port to the server.
- Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the volumes on the laptop to a folder.
- Unmount the Firewire drive.
- Shut down the laptop.
- Take out the firewire cable.
This works way better than either trying to use ditto or using a straight copy over the network.