Harddisks with form factor 2,5 inch have capacities of 1 or 2 terabyte nowadays. And usb 3.0 connectors supply enough current to run these harddisks. If it is possible to boot from such a harddisk into the imaging program you get a very compact backup and recovery system. Useful for snapshots of installed operating systems (allowing bare metall recovery).
Example of such a system with WD my passport 2,5′ USB 3.0 harddisk and TrueImage home 2013:
– use trueimage media builder to create a bootable usb stick (1GB)
– use diskpart in windows to repartition the my passport harddisk (with mbr partition table): create 2 primary partitions, make the first 1000 MB big, make this partition active and (quick) format it with fat32. The second partition takes the rest of the harddisk.
– open trueimage (inside windows) backup the first partition of the usb stick which has been made bootable by media builder.
– restore this backup to the first partition of the my passport harddisk
– boot into linux (a live cd could be used), format the second partition of the my passport harddisk with ext3 filesystem and create a folder for backups on this partition.
– verify that file /usr/share/syslinux/mbr.bin exists. (Else install syslinux). Then check the device name of the my passport harddisk, e.g. sdb and run as root user
dd if=/usr/share/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sdb
(Make sure that sdb is the my passport disk!).
In case of a gpt disk use gptmbr.bin and set the type of the second partition to 0700 (else trueimage does not save tib-files on this partition);
(additional remark: use gdisk /dev/sdb to set the legacy BIOS bootable flag on partition 1 (inside gdisk: p x a 1 2 <enter> w);
this makes the gpt disk BIOS bootable, at least syslinux works as bootloader on this partition and syslinux may load trueimage …).
– now you should have a bootable harddisk with space for backups
– tested with mac mini (6.1 = ‘late 2012’). – In case of usb reset errors it might be worth to try another usb cable; the bootable version of trueimage uses linux.