CCC new Recovery HD feature?

[bobright]

Whew I have not used CCC and backed up in a long time. I just updated to the most recent version and have a question. I have my settings right now as just making a clone of my Macintosh HD fusion drive to an external. I delete whatever is on the source of my hard drive and it deletes it from the clone. I am aware it isn't archiving and a true "back up" method but it works for me because I'm constantly deleting stuff I don't want saved.

Now the question I have though is I've been getting a pop up and theres an exclamation mark telling me to make a Recovery HD partition. It isn't telling me I have to but its always there where as I never noticed it before. Should I enable this in my situation? Can I turn it off somehow? I thought making a complete clone of my HDD would mean it'd be bootable anyway and also include this recovery of OSX hidden within somewhere?

 

[aliebel]

The Recovery HD is a separate partition than the partition that OS X is on. When it creates it, it resizes your OS X partition and creates a small one to hold the recovery. CCC only clones the files on your OS X partition. When you do a restore it advises you to create one since the destination drive may not already have one.

If you plan to restore to a drive you want to use as a bootable drive I would always recommend having a Recovery HD on it now. You never know when you'll need it and its a small footprint. Only caveat to that would be is if you really didn't want it and you leaned on having a Internet Recovery based mac to help you out in those situations. You could technically boot from the internet to get the recovery but that's more time and hassle than you'd probably want in a situation where you needed it.

 

[GGJstudios]

CCC only clones the files on your OS X partition. When you do a restore it advises you to create one since the destination drive may not already have one.

That's not true. CCC can, indeed, clone both the OS X partition and the Recovery partition. This is not a new feature, but has existed since the Recovery partition was introduced.

Will CCC clone Apple's "Recovery HD" partition?

 

[Weaselboy]

Now the question I have though is I've been getting a pop up and theres an exclamation mark telling me to make a Recovery HD partition. It isn't telling me I have to but its always there where as I never noticed it before. Should I enable this in my situation? Can I turn it off somehow? I thought making a complete clone of my HDD would mean it'd be bootable anyway and also include this recovery of OSX hidden within somewhere?

Yes, you should enable that. If you don't you will not have a copy of the 650MB recovery partition on the backup/clone disk.

A clone without the recovery partition would be bootable, but if you ever wanted to clone from the backup disk back to say a replacement disk, this would leave you without a recovery partition to clone back.

Give this a read.

 

[bobright]

That's not true. CCC can, indeed, clone both the OS X partition and the Recovery partition. This is not a new feature, but has existed since the Recovery partition was introduced.

Will CCC clone Apple's "Recovery HD" partition?

I thought it was new as I never seen the yellow exclamation mark but I guess it has been there for a while

The Recovery HD is a separate partition than the partition that OS X is on. When it creates it, it resizes your OS X partition and creates a small one to hold the recovery. CCC only clones the files on your OS X partition. When you do a restore it advises you to create one since the destination drive may not already have one.

If you plan to restore to a drive you want to use as a bootable drive I would always recommend having a Recovery HD on it now. You never know when you'll need it and its a small footprint. Only caveat to that would be is if you really didn't want it and you leaned on having a Internet Recovery based mac to help you out in those situations. You could technically boot from the internet to get the recovery but that's more time and hassle than you'd probably want in a situation where you needed it.

Yes, you should enable that. If you don't you will not have a copy of the 650MB recovery partition on the backup/clone disk.

A clone without the recovery partition would be bootable, but if you ever wanted to clone from the backup disk back to say a replacement disk, this would leave you without a recovery partition to clone back.

Give this a read.

Here's the deal though I've got a 1TB Fusion drive in my iMac. I am cloning to a 1.5TB external that is partitioned. I have 1.1TB for the clone and the rest on an empty partition. I would still have enough room right, would the Recovery HD go to my other partition? Could I just delete the empty partition so as to make things easier it wouldn't mess up anything on my backed up clone?

I hope that makes sense. I initially made the partition since my mac hard drive is only 1TB but kind of regret it as I don't plan to use the other space for anything else the drive is primarily for cloning.

 

[Weaselboy]

Here's the deal though I've got a 1TB Fusion drive in my iMac. I am cloning to a 1.5TB external that is partitioned. I have 1.1TB for the clone and the rest on an empty partition. I would still have enough room right, would the Recovery HD go to my other partition? Could I just delete the empty partition so as to make things easier it wouldn't mess up anything on my backed up clone?

I hope that makes sense. I initially made the partition since my mac hard drive is only 1TB but kind of regret it as I don't plan to use the other space for anything else the drive is primarily for cloning.

You can safely delete the empty partition if you like. The Recovery HD partition will go to a new partition that CCC will create when you enable that feature. After you enable it and do the clone you can enter "diskutil list" (without the quotes) in Terminal and you will be able to the 650MB Recovery HD partition.