Macintosh Disk Imaging
What is Disk Imaging?
If you are familiar with the PC you might have heard the terms “disk imaging” or “disk cloning” (sometimes it is called “ghosting”, referring to Norton Ghost, a software package from Symantec which allows you to create these images). These terms refer to a software-based process of making an exact duplicate of a hard drive. This copy is stored as a single compressed file that contains everything that was on the hard drive.
What is the benefit of Imaging?
If you’ve ever set up a computer from scratch, you know what a nightmare it can be. Even if there are no problems, there are so many factors and settings to worry about. In fact, if all of the computers in your office are similarly configured you probably have a checklist of all of the steps that you have to go through for every new computer, or every computer that has a bad crash and needs to be set up from scratch. We have a list like that here, and it is 15 pages long! What if you could run through that list just once, and then whenever you needed to setup a machine or recover a machine you could just load everything onto the computer with all of your applications and settings intact? That is the benefit of disk imaging!
What does Imaging entail?
Here is the process:
- We take a computer and reformat the hard drive.
- We load a fresh system onto the computer directly from the Apple System Install CD.
- We load any special system software and/or patches that are needed.
- We do a cleanup process and go through and disable unneeded Control Panels and Extensions. This is done based on each customer’s individual needs.
- We load all of the applications that are needed.
- We do a second cleanup sweep, getting rid of extraneous control panels or extensions that were installed.
- We go through the system and each application and set your preferences for you.
- We do a final cleanup procedure.
- We compress the entire hard drive using Apple’s Disk Copy utility.
- We can work with you to figure out how you want it delivered (external hard drives work well).
How often do I have to do this?
That is up to each person to decide for himself or herself. Our personal rule of thumb is that a new image should be created whenever there is a major system upgrade or if one or more of your critical applications is upgraded. For instance, you would have wanted a new image when Apple upgraded from 10.3 to 10.4. Or you probably would have wanted to create a new image when Adobe upgraded both PhotoShop and Illustrator within a few months of each other last year.
Remember - in the end you are trying to save yourself a significant amount of time when setting up new machines or fixing old machines. If you are spending hours applying patches and trashing things off of the image and loading new software, then you aren’t getting much of a benefit.
Will I need just one image for all of my computers?
That depends on how specific you want the image to be, and how much your setups differ from computer to computer.
We have found that you might want to create two different images - one for the “high-end” users (i.e., people who are using PhotoShop, Illustrator, Quark, etc.) and one for “low-end” users (i.e., the people who are just doing email and word processing). Additionally, if you have people who are using laptops you must have a separate image for them (Apple sneaks in several specific tweaks to the System for the laptops).
This doesn’t sound like rocket science - why should I pay you to do it?
Having worked on this process for a long time, we can tell you that it is in fact relatively simple, and that there are only a few tricks that you need to know. Actually, we’ll be happy to share these tips and tricks with any of our customers who care to learn more about the imaging process.
There are a couple of things to consider before trying to do this for yourself:
- You need to have a computer available that you can wipe clean and load from scratch. I would not recommend just trying to clean up a current machine and image that: don’t forget that the whole purpose here is to start with a clean slate for installs and maintenance. By using a machine that is already “in production” you might be propagating mistakes to other machines.
- Do you have eight hours to sit in front of a machine and watch it format and then load and tweak software? Our experience indicates that you have to be very focused and organized if you are going to do this successfully.
- Speaking of organization, don’t even bother trying this if you aren’t willing to sit down and write down every single step that you take while creating the image. This is critical for the next time that you update the image.
- Last but not least, you need to have some sort of hardware on which to put the image: a second hard drive in the computer or an external hard drive is really your only options. This drive is where the Disk Copy file is saved to while you are compressing the main hard drive.
Imaging sounds like a good idea - what’s next?
Give us a call and we’ll set up a time to come out and discuss it with you. We will need to take a look at your computers and work with you to figure out how they are configured. From there we will work with you to determine how many images we are going to make and how they need to be configured. Finally, we will sit down with you for a long session and go through every control panel and application and determine your preference settings so that we can duplicate those on the final image.
If this seems time intensive and costly, consider the amount of time that you can save doing routine maintenance, or how quickly you can get a person back up and running if their computer crashes!