Cloning Mac Harddrive

[Mind18]

Wasn't 100% sure about this, but when cloning an internal drive, is it necessary to back this up to a separate partition on the backup drive for it to be bootable?

 

[JNB]

If the backup drive is a separate drive from your internal, then by rights it should already be a separate partition (unless you're spanning physical drives).

Intel-based Macs can boot from the internal or an external via either Firewire or USB. True cloning using either SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner will give you a bootable clone.

 

[angelwatt]

You have to use a separate partition or drive, otherwise when cloning it'll run out of space because it'll continue to try and clone itself on itself, which is a recursive action with no end. I accidentally started a process like that once.

 

[Mind18]

Thanks JNB and Angelwatt. On the separate external hard drive, should there be a separate partion for the clone, or can it live amongst other backed up files (e.g. music) I have on that drive? Thanks again for the help.

 

[angelwatt]

Thanks JNB and Angelwatt. On the separate external hard drive, should there be a separate partion for the clone, or can it live amongst other backed up files (e.g. music) I have on that drive? Thanks again for the help.

It needs it's own separate HD or partition. Otherwise, the "other" files would be indistinguishable from the clone. The clone includes everything at the root level so it's not like you can have the clone in it's own folder, at least not that I've ever seen.

 

[sushi]

Just to add.

When you clone, you create an exact copy of the HD that you clone from. In my case, I clone to alternating external HDs that are the same size as my internal on a weekly basis over FW800. It's takes a few hours but then I have a complete image of my internal HD that I can boot from.

This way in your mind you know that only the clone files exist on the external HD. If you choose to store other files, you may end up accidentally erasing them when you clone. Additionally, I found that before I run CCC, I erase the target HD and run a quick Disk Repair on it before cloning so it is a fresh drive. Of course I couldn't do that if I was maintaining other files on the HD.

 

[Mind18]

Right. I guess an alternative would be just to create a disc image of the internal drive, then I could just store that file to my external harddrive that contains other back-end up files not on my internal harddrive.

 

[sushi]

Right. I guess an alternative would be just to create a disc image of the internal drive, then I could just store that file to my external harddrive that contains other back-end up files not on my internal harddrive.

Yes, you could do that.

However, you would not be able to boot from the external HD with the disc image.