How should usb bootable media be formatted for use with Mac?
I have recently installed Acronis True Image 2017 on a Mac mini running macOS Sierra and have created an Acronis back up of the entire hard drive to an external USB drive. Acronis advise that bootable media should be created immediately after the first backup. I have therefore purchased a USB stick to do this. It has come pre-formatted as MS-DOS (FAT32). Can I create the bootable media using this format or do I need to re-format to, say, Mac OS Extended (Journaled) or some other format?
I should be grateful for advice.
Thanks Enchantech.
So you’re saying that I simply leave the USB stick in its current MS-DOS (FAT32) format and Media Builder will do any reformatting should that be necessary? I had actually already looked at the link you provided but all it says there is that “The drive must have 4 GB (or more) of free space. For example, you can use an external hard drive or a USB flash drive.”
The partition used to write the recovery media cannot be larger that 32GB. FAT32 is to my knowledge the standard file format used in either Windows or MAC. Yes 1GB of available space on the intended partition for media creation is sufficient for creating the media.
FAT32 is to my knowledge the standard file format used in either Windows or MAC.
No, FAT32 is as dead as dead. Microsoft has used NTFS as standard for almost two decades and Mac has used Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for many years. Many USB stick do come preformatted with FAT32 though. :)
Marrea, i would have used Mac OS Extended (Journaled). :)
Acronis 2017 Mac - Creating Bootable Rescue
Been awhile since I made an Acronis bootable Flash drive on a Mac. Doesn't matter though, Acronis formats the disk when the media is created, but it does have to be a specific file system (I'm guessing OS X journaled, but can't remember) Worse case, it needs to be OS X journaled or it needs to be FAT32. If it's the wrong one, the media builder won't see it and won't proceed. Just go back into disk utility and format if you run into this and pick the other one.
FAT32 isn't dead - it's the default formatting from the manufacturer of most USB flash drives as it is not native to a specific OS and is universally supported across Windows, Mac, Linux, UNIX, etc. OS X journaled is specific to Mac (OK, you can work with it in Windows using a tool like HFS Explorer), NTFS is specific to Windows (OK, Mac can read it, but can't write to it)... exfat is fairly universal, but Acronis bootable media builder won't allow you to use a disk that is exFat. Hence, Fat32 is still the most common formatting for USB flash drives (at least, out of the box).
I should have been more clear in my reply I guess. Bobbo, thanks for geting things sorted!
Many thanks to you all for your advice.
I have now created Acronis Bootable Media using Media Builder, which put the following folders onto the USB stick: Applications, bin, dev, etc, Install macOS Sierra, Library, Network, private, Safe, sbin, System, tmp, usr, var, and Volumes. When I checked the stick in Finder’s “Get Info” I saw that Media Builder formatted it during the procedure as Mac OS Extended.
Hopefully I will never have to use it but it is reassuring to know that I have it should disaster strike! I notice that Acronis recommend creating a new rescue media every time Mac is upgraded to a newer version and I will bear that in mind.
Good deal! Hope you don't need it either :)
It's recommended to create the rescue media with newer builds, but not always necessary. Newer versions generally bring better support and fix bugs though so not a bad idea though. For the most part, just need to make sure that you are using a compatible version (for instance, Acronis 2015-2017 does not restore backups from Acronis 2012 and earlier)