Hi…I’m Serge Siou and Welcome to MacStudioA
If you've been following our Blueprint Series, Glad to see you back for Part 2, Creating
A Mac OS X System Image File.
Some basic facts about a Mac OS X System Image File:
1. A Mac OS X System Image File contains a OS X Operating System, in our case Mountain Lion,
plus all Mac App Store updates and Third-Party Applications installed, included on it.
2. It only takes minutes to restore a Mac System back to the way you originally had
it, as opposed to taking hours from a clean install.
3. And thirdly, you need two individual hard drives in order to create a System Image File,
one being the Macintosh Hard Drive and the other, an Internal or External Hard Drive.
So let's get started
What you will need:
1. An Intel based Mac System.
2. Plus an Internal and External Hard drive. (In our case, we'll be using a USB 3.0 External hard drive)
As always, don't forget to back-up your hard drive or hard drives when ever using the Mac
Disk Utility Application.
If you click on LaunchPad, it will show you all Applications on your Macintosh Hard Drive.
Everything in the yellow box will be included on the System Image File.
As you can see , some of the third party applications that I've already installed will be included
as well as any updates from the Mac App Store like GarageBand, iMovie and iPhoto.
At this point, We'll insert our External USB Hard drive, and wait a moment for it to initialize.
Click LaunchPad and click on the Other Folder, then click on the Disk Utility icon to launch it,
Now, from the Disk Utility Taskbar,
Click on File and scroll and click on New,
then scroll to "Disk image from Folder…"
From the Select Folder to image Window, we now need to locate our Macintosh HD.
Go to the name that you named your computer, in our case is named "iSerge's Macbook Air"
and click on the Macintosh HD icon, then click on the image button.
We'll give our image a name, and scroll to the location where we want to copy onto.
Which in our case, it's the External USB HD.
For easy cataloguing, we'll create a new Folder to copy our image in.
Click once on the newly created Folder, then click the Save button.
Now you'll be asked to enter your Admin Details.
Enter it, then click the OK button to proceed.
There is not set-time as to how long a System Image will take to create.
Ours took 45 minutes, it all depends on how many Third-Party Applications you installed
on your Mac system.
We'll just Time-lapse it now by 10,000 percent instead of you waiting.
Once the System Image File has been created, click on the left-hand panel on the dmg file
and "Scan Image for Restore".
This is quite important, If you don't do so now, it will ask you to do so when you restore
it from a USB boot disk.
Once again, you'll be asked for your Admin details in order for the process to begin,
do so, then press the OK button.
As before, there is no set time as to how long the Scan will take.
Ours took 16 minutes.
Again, we'll time-lapse it by 10,000 percent.
Onces the Scanning process is complete, click the OK button.
Then, double-click on the External USB hard drive and go to the newly created Folder,
to check if your System Image is there.
It will be the one with the dmg Extention.
Once located, right-click on it and Get Info, if you notice, the size is about 15.21 GB.
This file usually gets bigger, depending on how many Third-Party Applications you install
on it.
And that concludes Part 2, hope you join us for the third and final part, Part 3, "Putting
It All Together", where we'll be using what we created in Parts 1 and 2 and to demonstrate
how it all works.
Once again, if you have and questions or feedback or anything you don't understand, please leave
them in the comments below.
Hope you join us for Part 3, Peace.