Cloned and back

[blackscooby]

Hi,

I've got some time off work in the next couple of weeks, bizzarely I'm off on a road trip taking my parents camper from UK to southern Spain, where they'll fly out and meet me. I then fly back. (as I said quite some road trip !)

Anyways, I want to put a load of movies / TV programmes onto my Macbook so that I can watch something in the evenings. I've got Carbon Copy installed with an image on an external HD.

Is there any reason why I cannot perform a fresh install of OSX with minimal OSX OS and put my movies on. (Maximizing my disk space).

Once I come back I'll just wipe the disk and put back my original image which contains all my apps and documents.

Can anyone see any issues with this ?

Cheers

Mark

 

[ElectricSheep]

No issue at all. Just configure CCC to scan the image for Apple Software Restore when its done cloning, and you can go willy nilly with a fresh installation of whatever you want. At any time, you can use Disk Utility to restore the old image and return your system to exactly the state it was before.

I keep a such an image of my PowerBook's drive on an external FW400/USB2.0 drive that has a virgin installation of MacOS X on it (along with a few utilities and CCC). Since its bootable, its saved me from quite a bit of pain in the past.

EDIT:

I've also done this technique using the built in command-line tool dd. dd is useful when you want to try to create an image of a drive that has errors and will not mount/is slow to mount. It can be configured to ignore bad sectors (padding them out with zeros) when reading blocks from a drive. Useful trick that can really save the day.

 

[blackscooby]

Cool.

Just remembered it's SuperDuper I use... not Carbon Copy ~ doh.
Not sure if this allows me to restore w/o purchasing !

I'll perform a backup using Carbon Copy as I know this works from reading around.

Any ideas which is better, CC or SuperDuper, or any advantages / disadvantages between the 2.

Ta

EDIT > just read some more and found that CCC isn't Intel compatable.

 

[blackscooby]

Just done the math. At $27.95 SuperDuper ain't worth not buying ! (About £15!!)

Just reading the PDF Manual and it sound just what I want. Now where's that OEM install disk... Let's wipe that Mac