Bloat using Carbon Copy Cloner?

Hi all,

I meant to ask this a while ago but forgot. Until I just encountered it again, using CCC to restore my MacBook Pro after resizing my disk partitions. When I restored my files they took up more space than before! Whyyyy? I thought CCC was just that - a carbon copy? Surely the restore should be identically sized?

I first noticed it when I helped set up some G4 mac minis for a friend who'd bought them to use as node servers. All he needed was a minimal install of Leopard on each, with a couple of his own programs and crucially - he wanted them to be indentical, apart from the network name.

When I say some - he had 25! (All G4 1.25Ghz/40GB/512MB/Combo with no AP/BT).

I thought CCC would be perfect for this so we got one set up how he wanted it and then cracked out the firewire cables...so it went like this - I used CCC to duplicate the first one, then to another one, then we used those 2 to duplicate to two more, etc etc etc, thinking we'd get the installs done in excellent time this way, which we did.

But whoa! Hold on a minute....

When we went onto each to set up the network name we noticed something odd. The "last generation" ones, (something like a copy of a copy of a copy?) had noticably less free disk space than the first one we did. Luckily they were still placed in "order" so we could check to see what was going on and sure enough, the original one had the most disk space, then a bit less on the first duplicate, a bit less on the next one, etc etc! The clear difference was around 1GB each generation!

On a 40GB drive it's quite bad after a few generations.

Anyone know what's at work here? For the mac minis in the end we went back and just used the first one to copy to each of the other 24. I am considering starting again with a fresh install of SL on my MacBook Pro to regain my "proper" amount of free space!

I've done some searches and not found anybody complaining of this - have I just got a setting wrong or am I really the first to notice (and care!)? 🙂

Thanks,

Dan