Best method to clone a fully bootable backup to a PARTITION ?

[sparkie7]

Hi does anyone know which is the best software to do a complete bootable backup of my MBP. I have an external FW800 G-Tech drive which I have partitioned into 4 partitions.

1. Does Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! allow you to clone to a partition and boot of it? Or do you need to clone to a single drive (ie. without any partitions).

2. If its possible to clone to a partition, does that partition have to be empty or can you clone to a partition thats already got data/folders on it

Any advice appreciated. Thanks in advance

 

[sickmacdoc]

1. Yes you can clone to a partition with either the free Carbon Copy Cloner or the partially free SuperDuper. The free demo version of SuperDuper will only allow you to do full drive clones, so the next time you just wanted to update your backup (which goes MUCH quicker since only changed files get written) you would need to pay and register the app to allow you to do that. If not you would need to clone the whole drive again. CCC on the other hand allows either kind of backup free (although a donation is certainly appreciated by the developer).

2. If you use the incremental backup function in CCC you could theoretically clone to a used partition (it will work if you uncheck the "Delete items that don't exist on the source" option) but that defeats the idea behind a clone. A clone is an exact copy of the source drive, so an exact copy with other random files that were already on the partition is not the same thing.

 

[sparkie7]

1. Yes you can clone to a partition with either the free Carbon Copy Cloner or the partially free SuperDuper. The free demo version of SuperDuper will only allow you to do full drive clones, so the next time you just wanted to update your backup (which goes MUCH quicker since only changed files get written) you would need to pay and register the app to allow you to do that. If not you would need to clone the whole drive again. CCC on the other hand allows either kind of backup free (although a donation is certainly appreciated by the developer).

Thanks SickMacDoc. But will either of these clone so as to allow you to boot off the partition?

2. If you use the incremental backup function in CCC you could theoretically clone to a used partition (it will work if you uncheck the "Delete items that don't exist on the source" option) but that defeats the idea behind a clone. A clone is an exact copy of the source drive, so an exact copy with other random files that were already on the partition is not the same thing.

So you saying its best to clone to a EMPTY and CLEAN partition?

 

[sickmacdoc]

Thanks SickMacDoc. But will either of these clone so as to allow you to boot off the partition?

Yes, absolutely. In essence the OS treats each partition as a separate drive which it refers to as a volume, though we know that it is actually just a part of a physical drive. As long as your drive was partitioned with the correct type of partition map scheme for your Mac (GUID for yours since you have an MBP) cloning a boot drive to any partition will result in a bootable partition.

So you saying its best to clone to a EMPTY and CLEAN partition?

Yes- if I were cloning a drive (which I do with about 6Tb of drives) I would certainly only be using an empty partition so that it was an accurate and true clone.

 

[sparkie7]

Great, Thanks