Ok Guys/Gals,
I bit the bullet and decided to copy my system to an external drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. Seems to have worked, BUT something odd happened, I seemed to have "lost" 2GB of data when I copied my my system to the external drive and another 2GB when I copied it back to my MBP internal drive.
Here is what I did (total time over 8 hours, this is the short version of the story):
1. One of the hard drives in my my old MDD G4 system was a 320GB drive, with two partitions, I copied all the files that were on one partition to the other, that gave me a partition with almost 200GB of free space to work with. More than enough. I then had to pull the drive from the computer...
2. After I connected the drive to my 2011 MBP I discovered the old Firewire hard drive enclosure I had handy only supported drives up to 130GB! So I found my "USB 2.0 to IDE/ATA Cable Adapter", and tried that. Only to get a warning from Carbon Copy Cloner saying I may not be able to use the copy to restore a system because Intel Macs need a different set up or something, I forget the exact wording. So I hooked the drive back up to my MDD G4 (via USB 2.0) to copy ALL the files off that drive so I can erase the whole drive using Disk Utility on my OS X 10.6 MBP.
3. After that was done (I now have about 4 hours into this so far) I connected the 320GB external drive to my MBP and erased it, so it had just one big volume/partition. I then used Carbon Copy Cloner to to copy my system to the external hard drive using USB 2.0. Before I began the system reported my internal drive has a capacity of 749.16GB and that I used 120.74GB of that.
After I copied my system to the external drive (2 hours 10 min) I used "Get Info" on the two drives and got this:
Internal Drive: Capacity: 749.16 Available: 629.61 Used: 119.55
External USB drive reported this:
Capacity: 319.73 Available: 202.7 Used: 117.03
….You can see almost a 2GB difference in the space used.
I then booted off the USB drive and used Disk Utility to erase the internal 750GB drive and add two 30GB partitions to my internal drive, and then used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy my system back to the internal hard drive (1 hour 16 min) and got this:
External Drive: Capacity: 319.73 Available 202.66 Used: 117.07
Internal Drive (after I also added two 30GB partitions)
Capacity: 689.81 Available: 577.72 Used: 112.09
Both times Carbon Copy Cloner reported it copied 114.22GB. But I started with 120.74GB (or 119.55GB), but when I was done copying my system to the external drive and back I ended up with 112.09GB. After restarting "Get Info" reported my internal drive used 116.79GB. So 119.55 - 116.79 = 2.76GB "missing".
I did do a Time Machine backup of my internal drive to another external hard drive before doing all this. Does anyone know of a utility that would compare the contents of my internal hard drive to my Time Machine backup so I could see if I lost any important files while using Carbon Copy Cloner?
Thanks,
Jeff