I use a product for drive testing named Scannerz with FSE. Today I went to their site to download a troubleshooting doc, and I noticed they added a new how-to section to their site. I took a look and they have an article on there about cloning a hard drive using Disk Utility under Mountain Lion. Here's a link to the article if anyone's interested:
http://www.scsc-online.com/Disk Cloning with Moutain Lion.html
I assume that this process can be done with Lion as well, and I'm half guessing that it can be done with Snow Leopard, but using the install DVD instead of the recovery partition.
Back in the "good 'ol days" you used to be able to use a command line utility named "asr" to back up, restore, and clone volumes. I don't have any of the scripts handy I'd do this with, but in one mode you could do a block by block copy, which was faster, but required that the target volume be at least as large as the source volume. Another mode allowed you to clone one volume to another, even if the target was smaller, provided there was enough free space on the volume. This method was slower, but you could do a clone with drives/volumes of differing sizes. I remember thinking to myself that this would make bootlegging the OS really easy. Guess what? Newer versions of asr don't allow that anymore. I think Tiger was the last OS that supported that but I'm not sure.
In any case, the description in the link above, like the block copy mode of asr requires the target volume to be as large or larger than the source volume. This got me to wondering about some of the commercial apps for drive cloning. The two that come to mind are Carbon Copy Cloner, which used to be free, but now it's $39.95, and SuperDuper for $27.95. Do these things support cloning from larger to smaller volumes, assuming there's adequate free space on the target volumes? Any opinions on these? Are they worth the money? I mean seriously, if I can clone a drive for free why should I buy these?
Thanks.
http://www.scsc-online.com/Disk Cloning with Moutain Lion.html
I assume that this process can be done with Lion as well, and I'm half guessing that it can be done with Snow Leopard, but using the install DVD instead of the recovery partition.
Back in the "good 'ol days" you used to be able to use a command line utility named "asr" to back up, restore, and clone volumes. I don't have any of the scripts handy I'd do this with, but in one mode you could do a block by block copy, which was faster, but required that the target volume be at least as large as the source volume. Another mode allowed you to clone one volume to another, even if the target was smaller, provided there was enough free space on the volume. This method was slower, but you could do a clone with drives/volumes of differing sizes. I remember thinking to myself that this would make bootlegging the OS really easy. Guess what? Newer versions of asr don't allow that anymore. I think Tiger was the last OS that supported that but I'm not sure.
In any case, the description in the link above, like the block copy mode of asr requires the target volume to be as large or larger than the source volume. This got me to wondering about some of the commercial apps for drive cloning. The two that come to mind are Carbon Copy Cloner, which used to be free, but now it's $39.95, and SuperDuper for $27.95. Do these things support cloning from larger to smaller volumes, assuming there's adequate free space on the target volumes? Any opinions on these? Are they worth the money? I mean seriously, if I can clone a drive for free why should I buy these?
Thanks.