Or, you can re-clone once a month in the same partition just to have a backup of the system, just in case. If you want to do backup's to it regular you will want an equal or bigger partition for growth. CCC does not clone the Free Space you have on the internal drive you are cloning from. So you see, you can go down a bit, equal or up a bit and it still works. the other 2 partitions are for photo/music/file storage. 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. Say my original internal is 80 Gig and I want to clone it, but it is using only 30 Gig space now. You can get a bigger drive if you want, and partition it down to what you want to use. You know you need a 'Firewire' external drive to use it as a bootable drive. Whew, that's a tangled up understanding so if anyone can unravel this mess itd be great.Īlso, is CCC better than making disk images with Disk Utility? Or somehow does the clone make it unnecessary to reinstall the operating system before moving the cloned copy of the os back to the Apps drive. Do you have to reinstall the operating system (and the various application files that also are installed at that time) and then somehow transfer the clone back to the original drive. I still am not clear on how to create a bootable clone on a drive, and how to restore that clone. If so, it seems to make sense to get a modest hard drive just to hold a clone of the cleanly reinstalled system. So when you use CCC, you must have a drive dedicated to becoming the clone? You would lose all data on the target drive? Correct? From reading the instructions that come with the download of CCC, it seems that when you clone your Applications drive to another drive (as backup), you are essentially reformatting that 2nd drive to be a copy of the first, right?

Carbon copy cloner mac instructions