CCC or Superduper and external hard drive

[invasian]

Here is the situation that I'm in. I have a SRMBP and want to create a clone of OSX onto an external hard drive.

I have an external hard drive that i'm pulling from my old desktop. It's a 320 GB SATA drive that currently has 4 NTFS partitions on it that take up maybe 100 GBs in all. The remainder of the drive is unformatted and unpartitioned. My question is, will I run into any problems creating a clone on this drive (if i use the unformatted an unpartitioned space)? By problems, I mean is there a chance it will mess up and delete/overwrite the NTFS partitions? From reading the websites, they seem to recommend formatting the entire drive and starting from scratch.

I would like to be able to keep the 4 NTFS partitions (as it contains XP and my graduate thesis files). At worst, I could just partition the free space and format it as HTFS+ and transfer/copy the more important files until I have graduated.

 

[M@lew]

The partition you intend to backup your Mac to must be formatted HFS+. I use SuperDuper to clone my HD onto an external and it works fine. I partitioned the external with 120GB for the image and the rest was FAT32, but it's now HFS+ as I got another external, meaning you should be able to keep your other partitions. Just make sure you have enough space to back everything up.

 

[bmcgonag]

The partition you intend to backup your Mac to must be formatted HFS+. I use SuperDuper to clone my HD onto an external and it works fine. I partitioned the external with 120GB for the image and the rest was FAT32, but it's now HFS+ as I got another external, meaning you should be able to keep your other partitions. Just make sure you have enough space to back everything up.

I've used both SuperDuper and CCC and they pretty much do the exact same thing. SuperDuper, if you pay, does a sync type update after the initial clone, which saves a lot of time, and CCC does this for free, but with a lot of setup hassle in the beginning to make it work. So you have to weigh out what you are trying to do.

I use CCC, and just start it cloning at night when I'm going to bed. It takes a couple of hours for a 250GB drive.

Enjoy,

Brian

 

[cyclingplatypus]

I use CCC and do the exact same thing as bmcgonag.