Carbon Copy Cloner - anything better?

C

contoursvt

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Ok I'll be honest. I'm a PC guy starting out in the mac world - or well starting in OSX, not really macs. Today I was using the above software to image a 6 gigabyte boot partition from one mac to another via Firewire. The source was a G4 733 with 1gig ram and the destination was a dual 1gig with 1gig ram and a 120 gig drive. It took honest to god like 2 hours to image the partition.

I'm used to using Norton Ghost via network or disc to disc or disc to image..etc. Its like 10x faster if not more. Isnt there a non shareware app that is the equivalent of ghost? Say one that would read the drive structure and recreate it on another drive (partitions and all) and do so quickly?

On my 3Ghz p4 system (granted its got two 36gig 15K scsi drives) it takes about 3 mins to ghost my 4 gigs worth of boot drive from an image file which is on the 2nd scsi drive. Even if I find something 1/4 of this speed, it would be fine.

Thanks in advance guys
 
I use carbon Copy Cloner to back up and create images of multiple Macs to an external firewire drive. I don't think the software itself is the problem as I have just used it to copy a 140GB image and that took just under an hour.

In my experience it will take a longer if you select the 'Repair Permissions' check box or are trying to clone the disk you have booted from.
 
Looks like a similar feature set... Hmm... Any reports on its speed? :)
 
I have used both SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner and as far as I can tell there is no noticeable difference in the speed. Which is not surprising since both are dependent upon the same Unix commands to do their thing. The speed of cloning is primarily a factor of the size of the system being cloned, the speed of the drives involved, the connecting bus, CPU speed, and RAM.
 
Using SuperDuper on a G4/1GHz, 1.25GB ram, 60GB drive, 12GB used, took about 28 minutes to clone the drive. Cloned drive boots fine.
 
Hi everyone, thanks for the quick replies. I'll try unchecking the 'fix permissions' options and seeing if that helps much. Other than that, I cant think of why it would be so slow. Also I guess I'll just stick to carbon copy since most are saying there is no speed difference between it and superduper.
 
I just tried to superduper my drive to an ASR-image and it failed with some copy-error on a Java archive of some sort... Back to CCC for now. However I must say that I like the interface of SuperDuper! (although I hate names with !s in them...) and would actually _like_ to use it. But if it fails the first time I try it, it's not for me...
 
The speed of the copy will depend on the number of files you are copying. It will take longer to copy 1000 files that take up 1GB than it will to copy 1 file that takes up 1GB.
 
fryke: you might wanna give it another go, if you don't mind being a guinea pig again. There's a new version on versiontracker today...
 
Hmm... ;) I just used CCC to create an ASR image of my HD (~40GB) and it took quite a long time, and I then upgraded my main HD to 10.4 8A323, so I already _AM_ the guinea pig, although for something different. ;) ... As I don't really use CCC (or a competitor like SuperDuper!) that much, I'm not going to try just yet again. The coming days 'til Sunday night decide whether I stay on Tiger or move back to Panther, so I'll rather test my working environment a bit...
 
CCC and SuperDuper will both get the job done. CCC is more for getting disk images setup in a lab. More of it's preferences are geared toward that. SuperDuper has feature that are geared toward just backing up your system before doing an upgrade. That way if it gets screwed up you can restore the parts that were working.
 
I don't remember whether Ghost works sector-by-sector or actually copies the FAT and partitions in a more logical order (despite using it most every day).

If it's the former, theoretically, you could use an x86 machine to make a Ghost image of the Mac drive, and then just move the HDDs from the other Macs you need to copy to into the PC as secondary hard disks and copy it with Ghost as normal?

As I said, I'm not sure if this is possible, or safe. So don't go doing it to mission-critical data, but I figure it's worth a shot.
 
The "Restore" feature is intended for this very reason. It's blindingly fast, a 6 GB disk image is created in less than fifteen minutes and restored in under ten.
 
You have to "scan a disk image for asr" to change it to do a sector by sector copy. If you don't the restore takes for ever. CCC and SuperDuper both scan for asr and disk utility can convert non-asr image to asr ready.

Ghost can do sector by sector or byte by byte. You can change it in its options/preferences.
 
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