Read/Write sparse image on disk with files
 

Okay, hopefully this will not be as goofy as my last post. I have a 10GB hard drive as my startup right now in a G4 AGP Graphics tower. I am replacing it with a 160 GB drive. I also have a similar drive as a second hard drive. I intend to create a disk image using Read/Write sparse image to clone my startup drive and save it to the secondary drive. My question is this:
Does this risk data loss on the drive I am saving it to? That's something I definitely can't risk. Second, will I be able to then transfer this image to my new startup drive and turn that new drive into a simply bigger version of the original? I hope this makes sense. In other words, I simply want the new drive to be a 160 GB version (or actually, 128GB version, due to my system limitations) if the 10 GB drive I'm ditching.

As long as you're sure you've selected "Disk Image..." in the destination pop-up, any operations done will be done inside that image.

Of course, there's always a risk of data loss with anything...

And, yes, you can then restore... as explained in the User's Guide.

Okay, that sounds good to me. The risk of data loss was one more of a serious risk than a common one. And when I use the disk image for the new hard drive, it'll still function as 128 GB and not just 10?

Yes, when you copy file-by-file (as opposed to a low-level copy), the volume size doesn't really matter.