Advice on Cloning from Carbon Copy Cloner (Mike Bombich)

6 Sep 2011 22:16:15

Peter Shepheard

I downloaded Lion copied the installESD.dmg to a DVD and have used this DVD to install Lion to two other Macs. These all had Snow Leopard from the "family pack".

I first used Carbon Copy Cloner to Clone my Hard Drive to a new external Drive and then upgraded the external drive to check that everything worked.

Having started to clone the external drive now running Lion back to the internal drive I suddenly realised Iwas not sure if I should have re-formatted the original hard drive first. Everything worked OK but I thought I would ask Mike Bombich for his advice. Here it is:

I actually discourage reformatting the destination volume because 1) it's unnecessary 2) it makes the backup take longer and 3) until the backup is complete, you don't have a backup of your data! CCC can cleanly "upgrade" the OS installation on the backup volume. The way you did it is exactly what I would have recommended.

I was a completely new user of Carbon Copy Cloner and it did an excellent job for me on three macs. iMac, MacBook (old white one) and Mini. I feel it is well worth making a donation for a piece of software as good as this and I have had replies to two questions within 24 hours so the back up is excellent too.

I hope Mike's advice may be of help to someone else.