Hi there.. I'm running Leopard on an intel imac and have backed up my hard drive using Carbon Copy to an external. My plan is to reformat/wipe out my hard drive and then use Carbon Copy to restore it. I've backed up my much needed Creative Suite 3 and I don't have any discs to reinstall these programs. Will I lose these programs when I restore my hard drive from my external?
If you've cloned the hard drive (not just backed up the Applications folder) then you won't need to reinstall anything.
I found that the clone I made with carbon copy slower than the original drive, I think because all files were copied in alphabetical order, yet during a traditional install the files would be in a more logical order, for an operating system. I think if I did it again I would use carbon copy clone as a backup but try and migrate using my Time Capsule.
Carbon Copy can work like Time Machine, but its main purpose is to create a clone of your hard drive.
you can use time machine... if you're still with 10.4... you can use Carbon Copy Cloner to do a full backup... then set it to do an incremental backup and it will copy excatly what you have on your computer or put the changed files in an archive... so its like time machine. you have the changed files in there so its no problem... the thing is over time, it will take up more space in your hard drive.