Carbon Copy Cloner: do you have to wipe the target drive

The point of a cloned drive is that it is exactly the same as the source drive, so, yes, it will be necessary to completely wipe the drive you are cloning to: CCC will do this as part of the process. There is an option in its settings to make the drive bootable.

To boot from the clone hold the option key when starting up: after a bit of a wait you will be offered a choice of available disks to start from: choose your cloned drive and proceed. To restore a drive boot from the cloned drive and clone back from that to the original.

I believe that CCC allows you to copy selected files as a backup. In the CCC program, select (on the right) "Cloning options" and then "Copy selected files". Then (after selecting what you want on the left), click on "Target Disk" ("Select a Target") and choose "New disk image". This makes a ".dmg" file, I believe, that you can later mount and copy from.

I did this when I made a ".dmg" copy of my wife's ibook harddrive onto an existing external firewire drive that had other backups on it. I was nervous because CCC is set by default to "erase target drive" and I was scared that something bad would happen, but it didn't.

Hi,

You know you need a "Firewire" external drive to use it as a bootable drive.

You can get a bigger drive if you want, and partition it down to what you want to use. Say my original internal is 80 Gig and I want to clone it, but it is using only 30 Gig space now. I can clone on a 30 Gig partition (not very useful to run off in the future tho), or a 60 Gig partition (more useful as a boot drive and to make changes in use), or like I did with a 320 Gig external drive: make 3 partitions of 99+ Gig and use only one for the clone... the other 2 partitions are for photo/music/file storage. So you see, you can go down a bit, equal or up a bit and it still works. CCC does not clone the Free Space you have on the internal drive you are cloning from... just the Data.
If you want to do backup's to it regular you will want an equal or bigger partition for growth. Or, you can re-clone once a month in the same partition just to have a backup of the system, just in case. Depends on what you want to do with it.
One more thing, if you can format to Mac OSX Extended(Journaled), as that is what Mac uses and what the internal drive is formated to.

Note too, some drives have different ways to make them Firewire useable. Lacie is the most friendly for Mac, and WD has to be device loaded by USB before the firewire becomes active. Not all this will be in the instructions but the notes at the web-site are a better guide.

Enjoy

Jon:

Some of what I say will be repeating some of what has already been posted by way of giving a comprehensive response.

The two most popular and powerful utilities for backup/cloning are SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner. Both have their supporters. Both are effective and relatively easy to use. The latest version of CCC is more powerful, but, I think, SD is easier to use. One of these is the first element in making a clone.

SuperDuper will erase the Destination drive before cloning. CCC gives you an option. You really want it erased, unless you are doing cumulative (SmartUpdates in SD) updates, or you will end up with a jumble of stuff. Both will do cumulative updates. CCC allows you to drill down to a single folder. SD allows you to clone the entire HDD, or just the Users Folder. Both make bootable clones, diskimages, compressed read only disk images.

You need an external firewire Hard Disk Drive. Get the largest you can afford and partition it. Since PPC Macs will not boot from USB devices, firewire is important. There are a lot of HDDs out there, some are sexy looking, some have one touch backup etc. The most important feature in a firewire HDD is that it should have the more reliable Oxford 911+ chipset. This is the part that interfaces the Hard Disk Drive with the computer. When it goes, and it does go on many of these drives after the warranty has run out, the drive itself may still be functional but the computer can't see it. Here is a list of HDDs from OWC that have the Oxford 911+ chipset.

You need to format the new HDD Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and, if it is larger than you need for backup, partition it. Dr. Smoke's FAQ Backup and Recovery has excellent tips on backing up, and has a suggested scheme for partitioning your new external FW HDD. If you need step-by-step directions for partitioning and formatting, please post back and ask.

Finally, once you have chosen your partition scheme, adjusting or deleting partitions would destroy all data on the drive except you use third party software.

Cloning is an excellent way of backing up as it not only gives you a backup of your data and total installation, but it gives you an emergency boot drive as well as a drive from which you can boot to run diagnostics and repairs on your internal HDD.

Please do post back with further questions or comments.

Cheers 🙂

cornelius

I just want to be absolutely clear about this: I have CCC and would like to use it more often than I do, but the person who recommended it to me said I would have to erase the drive I was copying to (an external hd, Fantom Titanium 80 GB Firewire) each time before I could do the backup. I infer from what you are saying that CCC does the erasing automatically. I have been so afraid of losing my backup in the erasing process that I was even considering getting a second external hd to cover me during this process. Do I rightly conclude that all this is unnecessary. All I have to do is order the clone? (I have been cloning the entire contents of my internal hd rather than omit something essential. Comments about this practice are also welcome.)

aag:

Version 2, which you will be using with OS X 10.3x allows you to go to Preferences and check the box to make cumulative backups. When you do this CCC will scan your HDD and the backup and delete only items to be updated. However, that cumulative update part did not work for me after a while when I used CCC with Panther. That is when I started to use SuperDuper, which enables you to make SmertUpdates (cumulative updates). SD will scan both your Source volume and Destination Volume, compare contents and update the Destination Volume with new or modified items on the Source. To be able to do this with SD you have to register your copy for a fee of $8.95 (or something like that).

For more specific questions about Carbon Copy Cloner go to the Bombick Software Forums and there will be folk there who can give you specific answers to your questions.

Good luck.

cornelius

Hi agg,

In addition to cornelius' excellent advice.

The latest version of CCC is 3.0.1, which is a vast improvement over version 2. I don't really remember how version 2 worked, but in this version, you do not need to erase the target drive each time you create a backup.

Assuming you've already done an erase of the target drive to do your initial clone, then do this.

1) Launch CCC and chose your source and target drives.

2) On the right under "Cloning options:", change the pull down menu to "Copy selected items". Don't uncheck anything at the left or you'll end up with an incomplete clone.

3) Under the pull down menu you changed, turn on the check box for "Delete items that don't exist on the source".

4) Click Clone.

CCC will clone the source drive without erasing the target. It will only add files that don't exist on the target drive and remove those that don't. There's a catch with CCC though. Here's what it says it will do with the choices we made above. Replace "G5" and "Files" with whatever would be the names or your source and target drives.

The selected items from "G5" will be copied onto "Files". Items on "Files" will not be overwritten if they are newer than items at the same path on "G5". Any items that exist on "Files" that do not exist at the same path on "G5" will be deleted. Deleted items and the earlier version of modified files will not be archived.

Note what I highlighted in red. Say you updated a program and then cloned your drive. You later decide you'd rather have the older version of the app you updated. So you uninstall the app and reinstall from your original disks. Then you clone your drive again with CCC. You will NOT have a perfect clone since CCC won't overwrite newer files.

CCC is a great free program, but depending on the circumstances, won't really create a true clone. That's why I use the registered version of SuperDuper! When you use the Smart Update feature, your cloned drive will always be an exact replica of the source.

Hi Kurt:

I referenced the earlier version since the OP has Panther listed in the profile and CCC v. 3x requires Tiger, to the best of my knowledge.

Thanks for your detailed information, though.

Cheers 🙂

cornelius

I referenced the earlier version since the OP has Panther listed in the profile and CCC v. 3x requires Tiger, to the best of my knowledge.

Oh, DUH! Forgot I was in the Panther forum. Yes, you are quite correct. agg can only use version 2.x, which will always erase the target drive.

aag:

Hope all goes well for you. With SuperDuper your initial clone will be a full clone and will take a bit of time. Subsequent SmartUpdates will take a very small fraction of the time.

Do post back should you have further questions or comments.

Cheers 🙂

cornelius

cornelius, Kurt, the two of you are great. Thanks for all the thoughtful advice. For now I will just do complete clones, time-consuming though they may be, and I'll look into superduper....