Cloning start up disks - how long does it take?

Depends on the hard drive - if you have dual-core and PCI-E you should be able to copy 65-100GB / hr but it depends on file sizes and other things.

Personally, I'd wait and do more testing and torture the drive first and break it in, really.

My pref is SuperDuper after yrs with CCC.

And don't forget to run Disk Warrior when done.

Hi there! Just so you know, if you are running a system off of the 300 GB disk while restoring it to the 1 TB disk, it will take eons longer (I've done this many times). If there is a way for you to start up off of an external drive or another system first, that would help a whole lot. Either way, you will definitely want to leave it overnight. It takes me a few hours to restore disks in the 100 GB or less range... you'll probably want to take advantage of the night hours before you tackle this.

Also, it's probably easier to use the Restore option in Disk Utility to image hard drives than to use a third party app. All you have to do is drag the disk you want to restore from over to the top, and the disk you want to restore to over to the bottom, and click restore. Very simple and easy.

If you have any more questions just let me know!

Yes it is 'preferable' to clone or backup from another drive other than a live system, but it has never caused problem or slowdown (do you really think it does or will? on a G5?) - I've tried to mess up SuperDuper by working, then run DW and redo SD (to pick up changes).

A good program will SKIP open or files modified showing time stamp after the backup operation began (SD doesn't though it seems).

SD is real hard, except DU Restore is known for ignore ownership flag to be set ON which WILL mean your system ownership and permissions will not be correct.

{quote:title=The hatter wrote:}
Yes it is 'preferable' to clone or backup from another drive other than a live system, but it has never caused problem or slowdown (do you really think it does or will? on a G5?) {quote}

I never said it would cause a problem. I don't think it will. However it will certainly cause a slow down, no doubt. The hard drive running the system is already spinning its platter just running the OS. Once you open DU or whatever utility you wish to use, it will be reading even more information off of the platter. This means the OS and the imaging software will be running off of the same disk it is imaging (itself). The platters can only spin so fast... the faster the platter spins (hopefully at least 7,200 RPM), the faster the image copies. Therefore it is common sense that booting a system on a disk other than the source disk or restore disk will speed up the process, because more platter spins will be dedicated to reading/writing the image information.

Right?