My MacBook Pro needs to go in for some repairs. It has the processor whine, my right fan’s bearing is going out so it’s really noisy, and my Superdrive will not read burned or blank DVDs.

While my MBP is at the shop, I am going to use my Mac Mini for my full time machine. I put in all my RAM in to it, 2GB, and have been attempting to restore the Mac Mini’s hard drive with the data from my MBP. For some strange reason, Disk Utility keeps failing with an error when it’s about halfway through copying the data, regardless of if it’s from my backup drive or my internal drive on my MBP. SuperDuper also fails, but less gracefully, just straight up crashing.
I’m frustrated. I can’t get my data to copy successfully from drive to drive. DiskWarrior and TechTool Pro both report zero problems with the hardware of the drive, and the various software components they can fix. Normally this is a piece of cake, I’ve done it a number of times without any issues.

So for now, I’m going to install a fresh copy of OS X on the Mini, then run the Migration Assistant to see if it can get all my junk across. The Migration Assistant is fairly complete, but sometimes misses some of those little customizations I’ve done to the system.

Thankfully, I have two copies of my data, so I’m not in bad shape yet, but this has brought me to think about my backup strategy. Currently I use SuperDuper each evening to copy my boot drive to an external. I think I’ll be changing that to a rotating once every 3 day backup, with two different drives doing the backups.

I also need to make a bootable drive with my various troubleshooting and backup utilities. Diskwarrior, TechTool Pro, Rember, SuperDuper, and any others that I can think of.

UPDATE: I did a fresh install of OS X, then used the Migration Assistant to copy everything over. Some minor adjustments here and there, some reinstalls of a few minor programs, and I seem to be back up and running. I’ll have to do a few more tests, but I think everything made it over just fine. My hat’s off to Apple for the fantastic Migration Assistant. It always seems to help me when I’m in a pinch.