ASR For Mac OS

Apple Software Restore •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• How To -2- Table of Contents Overview 4 Restoring from a CD 5 Restoring from an External Disk Drive 5 Restoring from a Server Volume 5 Restoring from a NetBoot Server 7 Creating and Distributing an ASR Image 8 Step 1: Configure your Macintosh 8 Step 2: Create a restore image 9 Step 3: Distribute your image 12 Advanced Topics 16 Multiple images and description files 16 Machine Specific Settings 17 Image from Device vs. Image from Volume 17 Post actions 18 Changing the volume creation date for Macintosh Manager 18 Segmenting your images – How? When? Why? 18 ASR preferences file 18 -3- Overview This document is not official Apple documentation, but instead, provides some guidelines for using Disk Copy and ASR. Tommy Hann, Consulting Engineer for Apple Computer, wrote the document and comments may be sent to hannt@apple.com. Apple Software Restore (ASR) is an Apple utility for restoring a standard software configuration to a Macintosh. With ASR and another utility called Disk Copy, you can make a restore image from a working Macintosh and later restore that image to other Macintoshes, assuming they are of the same model. For example, you might need to configure a large number of iMacs with the same Mac OS and certain applications that you have licenses for. Using ASR and Disk Copy, you could configure all of these Macintoshes with the exact same configuration so that the software is the same on each. Basically, you are creating a full backup of one machine and restoring it to other like machines. The first step of this process is to create a restore image (similar to a backup) using Disk Copy. Once you have created the image, you must then determine how to distribute that image using ASR. The simplest example of distributing the image is to create a bootable CD containing ASR and the restore image. To restore the image to a computer, you would boot from the CD and launch ASR. However, as more and more information is being stored on Macintosh hard disks, a CD isn’t large enough in some cases to hold an entire image. In this case, an external storage device such as a FireWire Disk Drive could be used as an alternative. Finally, servers can be used to store and distribute the images. The following sections describe each of these distribution me…