Advice to Clone

[Michael73]

Super simple question...

I've outgrown my 500GB HD - it's my boot drive. I picked up a 1.5TB drive at BB for a cool $119.99 that I want to replace it with. Since I have a MP, can I just slide the new drive into one of the other bays, format it, and then use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner?

I've never used either program but it seems these are the most popular based on the comments in these forums. Does it matter which one I use e.g. is one better than the other?

I just need a single copy, no scheduling. I got a second 1.5TB drive that I'll be using at a TM drive.

 

[dubhe]

Now, I am not a pro, but I think that CCC copies files in alphabetical order, which means they are not in a logical order on the new disc. Does this not potentially make the drive slower?

If the above is true then surely a clean install of Leopard onto the new disc, and then Migration Assistant to copy files across would make more sense?

 

[sickmacdoc]

Yes, that will work just fine. Make sure when you format it that not only do you make it Mac OS Extended (Journaled) but also make sure a GUID partition table map is established too. If you need help with that, just shout.

As far as the differences between CCC and SD, they are for all intents and purposes cosmetic/personal preference issues as the final result is intended to be identical no matter which is used. I have and use both but tend to use CCC more just from simplicity. I've tested both recently using a 26Gb test data set to the same freshly formatted drive each time through and the speed is issue is almost identical. SD took about 46 minutes (slow because it was a USB drive) while CCC took about 43 minutes so close enough to call it a tie.

One other difference is that you can use all the functions of CCC with the free download, but SD's free mode has several functional limitations until you pay the $27.95 license fee. You can use the free version to do unlimited complete drive clones (like the first time around will be for either app), but for follow-up passes to keep your clone up to date (incremental updates which are vastly faster than doing another complete clone) CCC will do it free and you must license your SD to do them.

One last thing as a friendly warning- because of some issues with Seagate firmware on those 1.5Tb drives, be sure you don't erase your original boot drive right away after starting to use the new one as the boot drive. Not until you are comfortable that the issues found in several threads about the 1.5Tb Seagates here on MR have been addressed and you got one of the latest revisions of the drive at least.

 

[Michael73]

Yes, that will work just fine. Make sure when you format it that not only do you make it Mac OS Extended (Journaled) but also make sure a GUID partition table map is established too. If you need help with that, just shout.

Thanks. I haven't done a disc format in a while. Not long after I got my MP in late-2006, I loaded up on 500GB drives. I seem to remember using Disc Utility and it being pretty easy. With 1.5TB drive so cheap I can triple my space from 2TB (4 x 500GB) to 6TB (4 x 1.5TB).

As far as the differences between CCC and SD, they are for all intents and purposes cosmetic/personal preference issues as the final result is intended to be identical no matter which is used. I have and use both but tend to use CCC more just from simplicity. I've tested both recently using a 26Gb test data set to the same freshly formatted drive each time through and the speed is issue is almost identical. SD took about 46 minutes (slow because it was a USB drive) while CCC took about 43 minutes so close enough to call it a tie.

Ugh. I forgot this is going to take a while I got 320GB to transfer.

One other difference is that you can use all the functions of CCC with the free download, but SD's free mode has several functional limitations until you pay the $27.95 license fee. You can use the free version to do unlimited complete drive clones (like the first time around will be for either app), but for follow-up passes to keep your clone up to date (incremental updates which are vastly faster than doing another complete clone) CCC will do it free and you must license your SD to do them.

Just out of curiosity, why would you use a program like CCC or SD to do incremental updates rather than Time Machine?

One last thing as a friendly warning- because of some issues with Seagate firmware on those 1.5Tb drives, be sure you don't erase your original boot drive right away after starting to use the new one as the boot drive. Not until you are comfortable that the issues found in several threads about the 1.5Tb Seagates here on MR have been addressed and you got one of the latest revisions of the drive at least.

Good points. First off, I HAVE TO keep my original 500GB drive since it's the one that came with the machine and I still have AppleCare. I've read here and other places that if you have third-party parts in the machine e.g. RAM, HDD, etc. and there is a problem with the machine and you take it back to an Apple Store for repair under and Apple Care agreement, they can give you problems and refuse to cover the repair.

The other thing is that I've heard the issues with the firmware and the Seagate drives have been corrected. The first ones that came out had issues but I've read that newer firmware is available for download for those early adopters but current drives ship with the correct firmware. Have you heard differently?

 

[tersono]

Super simple question...

I've outgrown my 500GB HD - it's my boot drive. I picked up a 1.5TB drive at BB for a cool $119.99 that I want to replace it with. Since I have a MP, can I just slide the new drive into one of the other bays, format it, and then use SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner?

I've never used either program but it seems these are the most popular based on the comments in these forums. Does it matter which one I use e.g. is one better than the other?

I just need a single copy, no scheduling. I got a second 1.5TB drive that I'll be using at a TM drive.

Yup - as the previous poster said, that'll work just fine. I use CCC to clone Macs for work purposes on a regular basis (I'm a systems admin - we sometimes need to set up two or three identically-configured machines at the same time), and it's very reliable.

 

[sickmacdoc]

1. Thanks. I haven't done a disc format in a while. Not long after I got my MP in late-2006, I loaded up on 500GB drives. I seem to remember using Disc Utility and it being pretty easy. With 1.5TB drive so cheap I can triple my space from 2TB (4 x 500GB) to 6TB (4 x 1.5TB).

2. Ugh. I forgot this is going to take a while I got 320GB to transfer.

3. Just out of curiosity, why would you use a program like CCC or SD to do incremental updates rather than Time Machine?

4. Good points. First off, I HAVE TO keep my original 500GB drive since it's the one that came with the machine and I still have AppleCare. I've read here and other places that if you have third-party parts in the machine e.g. RAM, HDD, etc. and there is a problem with the machine and you take it back to an Apple Store for repair under and Apple Care agreement, they can give you problems and refuse to cover the repair.

5. The other thing is that I've heard the issues with the firmware and the Seagate drives have been corrected. The first ones that came out had issues but I've read that newer firmware is available for download for those early adopters but current drives ship with the correct firmware. Have you heard differently?

Hope you don't mind me numbering those parts- makes it easier to respond I have found.

1. Yes, formatting is pretty straight forward but to insure it is bootable on your MP as I mentioned the partition map needs to be set to GUID. Be sure that when you go into Disk Utility that you use the Partition tab to prepare the drive. Changing the "Volume Scheme" pulldown menu from "Current" to any other number (even "1 partition") will allow the important button at the bottom ("Options") to become clickable. At first when you enter the Partitition window, that button will be greyed out. When you cick Options it will give you the ability to set the partition map type, and from the descriptions of them in that window, you will see why this important!

2. It won't be nearly as slow as the rates I posted, as those were with clones going to an external USB drive. With both your drives being used internally they will communicate over the SATA bus and will FLY compared to the rates I posted. Still not going to happen instantaneously, but a heck of a lot faster than the example.

3. On my boot drive I use both CCC and TM actually. The main reason for that is that if your boot drive should die with a clone available, you can immediately boot from the clone and get right back to work. That is not possible with a TM backup since it is not bootable. With TM only, you would have to wait until you replace the failed drive and restore all the software before yours system could be booted again.

4. Technically that is true, but since the MPs are meant to have user-added drives it really should not pose a problem, but keeping it of course can't hurt.

5. From what I have read, the problems extended to more than just the first ones that came out, as a subsequent firmware fix was failing as well and plenty of people threw their hands up in the air on it. Now to be fair I would be the first to say that I have not followed this topic recently as I developed a lot more interest in the WD 2Tb drives and such as a result of the problems not just with the 1.5Tb Seagates but with subsequent problems with at least one model of their 1Tb drives too.

 

[Michael73]

Hope you don't mind me numbering those parts- makes it easier to respond I have found.

1. Yes, formatting is pretty straight forward but to insure it is bootable on your MP as I mentioned the partition map needs to be set to GUID. Be sure that when you go into Disk Utility that you use the Partition tab to prepare the drive. Changing the "Volume Scheme" pulldown menu from "Current" to any other number (even "1 partition") will allow the important button at the bottom ("Options") to become clickable. At first when you enter the Partitition window, that button will be greyed out. When you cick Options it will give you the ability to set the partition map type, and from the descriptions of them in that window, you will see why this important!

2. It won't be nearly as slow as the rates I posted, as those were with clones going to an external USB drive. With both your drives being used internally they will communicate over the SATA bus and will FLY compared to the rates I posted. Still not going to happen instantaneously, but a heck of a lot faster than the example.

3. On my boot drive I use both CCC and TM actually. The main reason for that is that if your boot drive should die with a clone available, you can immediately boot from the clone and get right back to work. That is not possible with a TM backup since it is not bootable. With TM only, you would have to wait until you replace the failed drive and restore all the software before yours system could be booted again.

4. Technically that is true, but since the MPs are meant to have user-added drives it really should not pose a problem, but keeping it of course can't hurt.

5. From what I have read, the problems extended to more than just the first ones that came out, as a subsequent firmware fix was failing as well and plenty of people threw their hands up in the air on it. Now to be fair I would be the first to say that I have not followed this topic recently as I developed a lot more interest in the WD 2Tb drives and such as a result of the problems not just with the 1.5Tb Seagates but with subsequent problems with at least one model of their 1Tb drives too.

1. Thanks for the info. Done. Made sure GUID was selelcted.

2. Decided on CCC. You're right - it's flying. Can't really figure out the progress bar. It's 27 minutes into the clone and it says it's copied ~25GB but the progress bar shows it's about 2/3 done?!?

3. Just a hint but I've read in a couple of places that you can partition your TM drive, put a copy of Leopard on a small 10GB partition and use that as your boot drive and then restore files from the TM backup. I've also read you can put a copy of Leopard on the same partition as the TM backups . I've never tried this, but I've read about it.

4. The plan is to eventually buy a 2 drive enclosure from OtherWorld and throw my old 500's in it. I may also get that cable thingy so I have can take advantage of eSATA.

5. I discovered the 2TB drives about 2 weeks ago. On Newegg they were $299.99 which is pretty cheap. Considering though that 1TB internal drives are around $100 it's a premium for new technology. My guess is that by x-mas they'll be sub-$200 and maybe in the $150 range.

 

[sickmacdoc]

3. Just a hint but I've read in a couple of places that you can partition your TM drive, put a copy of Leopard on a small 10GB partition and use that as your boot drive and then restore files from the TM backup. I've also read you can put a copy of Leopard on the same partition as the TM backups . I've never tried this, but I've read about it.

4. The plan is to eventually buy a 2 drive enclosure from OtherWorld and throw my old 500's in it. I may also get that cable thingy so I have can take advantage of eSATA.

3. Yeah that would work, but I'm lazy too- I would rather just have a drive that already has my documents and everything on with a simple restart rather than having to restore anything at all (documents, applications, app. support items, etc etc etc). I can do that with one partition for TM and another for CCC!

4. If you decide to get one of the onboard SATA port extenders down the line, PM me! I bought one (Sonnet) at the same time I purchased my MP and when I saw that it was not hot swappable in addition to me needing to take so much out of my shiny new MP to get to the ports, I set it aside and just popped in a cheap two port SATA PCIe card that supports port multiplier cases instead!

Good luck with your setup!

 

[sickmacdoc]

2. Decided on CCC. You're right - it's flying. Can't really figure out the progress bar. It's 27 minutes into the clone and it says it's copied ~25GB but the progress bar shows it's about 2/3 done?!?

Whoops forgot that one-- that would indicate to me that you have some large files waiting to be copied, as the progress bar seems to express progress only in terms of the total number of files copied rather than the actual percentage of the total data to be copied. Sometimes that progress bar because of that will look stalled on a big file and the "data copied" part won't update until the whole file is copied either.

 

[drlunanerd]

As far as the differences between CCC and SD, they are for all intents and purposes cosmetic/personal preference issues as the final result is intended to be identical no matter which is used.

It's more complicated than that unfortunately. This article explains much, even though some of the software it refers to has been updated since.
CCC used to be bad at preserving file metadata and I stopped using it a long time ago. I think its copying engine has been changed since though and I note it can now clone at block level so it may no longer have the issues it did in previous versions.

Anyway, there's no need for third-party software if all you're doing is cloning one disk to another when upgrading. Just use Disk Utility or the asr command to do a device-level clone.

 

[sickmacdoc]

It's more complicated than that unfortunately. This article explains much, even though some of the software it refers to has been updated since.
CCC used to be bad at preserving file metadata and I stopped using it a long time ago. I think its copying engine has been changed since though and I note it can now clone at block level so it may no longer have the issues it did in previous versions.

Anyway, there's no need for third-party software if all you're doing is cloning one disk to another when upgrading. Just use Disk Utility or the asr command to do a device-level clone.

Yes, CCC did have some problems apparently when that article came out in 2006 and it is specifically linked to on the CCC front page along with the updated information. So for that reason alone, it seems unbalanced to hold a 2006 review of an old version as representing the current version myself.

And I agree that for a straight transfer to another drive Disk Utility will do ok on a one shot basis. I was thinking more in terms of having a bootable backup that can be maintained automatically (if desired).

 

[dubhe]

Now, I am not a pro, but I think that CCC copies files in alphabetical order, which means they are not in a logical order on the new disc. Does this not potentially make the drive slower?

I have followed this thread throughout today, very interesting. But is there any truth in what I have typed above? CCC definitely copied files in alphabetical order when I used it, or did I not set it up right?

 

[Michael73]

Reporting Back

Just thought I'd report back...

I downloaded CCC which was super simple. I shut down the MP, installed the new 1.5TB drive and restarted the machine. Of course, as soon as the machine was powered on it found the new drive which I formatted as Journaled and 1 (LARGE) partition making sure the option for GUID was checked. I then used CCC and it worked flawlessly. It took about 2hrs 53min to copy 319GB from one drive to another. After going back to utilities and choosing a new drive as the start-up, I restarted the machine and everything worked flawlessly.

For you MacPro folks, my start-up drive was in drive bay 1 and the new 1.5TB drive was in bay 4. When I powered down the machine for the second time, I took out the original shipped 500GB start-up drive in bay 1 and put the new 1.5TB drive in its place. In bay 4, I replaced another old 500GB with a brand new 1.5TB drive. After powering on the machine, I formatted the new drive as Journaled and made sure the option for GUID was checked. I then turned on Time Machine and excluded the 500GB drives in bays 2 & 3 and let TM run. Again, it took around 2 hours to complete the first back up.

So far, so good!

 

[sickmacdoc]

<clip>
So far, so good!

That all sounds great! Glad everything went so smooth for you!

 

[sickmacdoc]

I have followed this thread throughout today, very interesting. But is there any truth in what I have typed above? CCC definitely copied files in alphabetical order when I used it, or did I not set it up right?

Well I did some research on this in the CCC forums and it seems that older versions (in the 2 series) did copy files at the root level alphabetically, and as a matter of fact the developer suggested putting a file with leading z's (something like zzzztest) at the root level of the drive as a test if the user suspected that copying had not finished normally.

That is no longer the case in the total rewrite that became V3.x.x (3.1.3 currently) as the developer has noted that it no longer sorts the way it did so the old test is no longer valid, but I did not see a definition of how it is done now.

So anyway it seems it once did, but apparently does not any more. All I know is that it works fine for me!

 

[dubhe]

So anyway it seems it once did, but apparently does not any more. All I know is that it works fine for me!

Thanks for that, happy I am not going mad and did in fact pay attention!

 

[fandangoguy]

Does CCC or Superduper have problems with Adobe CS4 registrations?

I hope this thread is still alive! Still new here. I want to make a bootable disc of my new 27" iMac i5 onto a Lacie HD drive but I read somewhere that Carbon Copy Cloner had some issues with Adobe CS2/3 applications-such as registrations and that users found themselves unable to make their applications work...? did I read that or am I losing my mind...? I understand that such a problem would be on Adobe's court but I would like to make a bootable clone that really works..
I got one of the new i5 (yep..the screen has some occasional blackouts...nothing serious yet but...) and if I needed to send it for repairs etc I would like to have some peace of mind knowing that whatever happens, I can restore EVERYTHING from the Lacie and not have to do all the data migration, installing , registering etc..
am I expecting too much? maybe I need a reality check!

I await for your feedback.
thanks

 

[Nilo Santos]

Newbie Me Too

I want to make a bootable disc of my new 27" iMac i5 onto a Lacie HD drive but I read somewhere that Carbon Copy Cloner had some issues with Adobe applications-such as registrations..
I have Adoble CS4 right now.. I would like to make a bootable clone that really works.. I would like to have some peace of mind knowing that whatever happens, I can restore EVERYTHING from the Lacie and not have to do all the data migration, installing , registering etc..

Yes - ditto on the above.

I bought the 27" iMac i7 with software apps that were already pre-loaded and pre-installed (Adobe CS4, Final Cut, Logic, etc.)
but I don't have the original discs or installers for these software apps.

Can I use CCC or SD to copy these software apps into an external hard drive, and be able to re-install them again?
(in case of loss due a re-format or service repair) or even be able to install these software apps on another computer?