Using Disc Utility for Backup Clone

Restore makes a complete copy of everything, every time (no deltas). CCC only copies things that changed.

I don't think Restore will restore to a partition of a different size. It must be exactly the same. CCC will happily copy to larger or smaller partitions, as long as the overall space allows it.

Restore is all or nothing. CCC will let you choose what to restore, e.g. you can omit printer drivers or huge sound libraries.

The utility that underlies CCC is called 'rsync'. I forget what underlies DU's Restore, but it might be 'dd'. You can read their man pages to see other differences.

 

I may have misremembered that constraint. It was at least a few years ago that I evaluated Restore for doing backups, so I can't recall exactly why I decided against it.

Double-check that the restored partition actually remains at the original size (reboot after Restore). I know 'dd' is able to write a smaller source to a larger target, but the resulting file-system (when the source is a file-system) may not cover the larger size. Or maybe Restore used to have a restriction that's since been lifted.

--- Post Merged, Mar 16, 2017 ---

Forgot to address this.

I think "added to" is in the metadata store, i.e. the Spotlight metadata. So if that's not being preserved by CCC, then it can't be restored. There may be a CCC option to preserve it, I don't recall.

 

I knew and was confident of the "source is larger" constraint. It's the "source is smaller" one I was unsure of. As I said, it's been a while since I evaluated this, and I'm uncertain whether it was a real constraint at the time, or whether I've misremembered it. It was probably in the days of 10.2 Jaguar that I did that evaluation.

I also realized that the partition's size is the deciding factor, not the amount of space in use. I didn't point that out, and now you have, so thanks for clarifying that point.