switching from Carbon Copy Cloner

[tngland]

I would imagine that this has come up before, but I am new to SuperDuper. I have an external Firewire drive recently backed up using Carbon Copy Cloner, although there are additional files on that drive in addition to the system (from various sources).

What's the best approach for me to start using SuperDuper on that drive?

I finally got fed up with my CCC results not being bootable, had to erase the HD too many times to get it to work & that's too much of a hassle since I have all those other files onboard.

Thanks for any advice,

Thomas S. England
Decatur GA 30030
Photojournalism Portfolio:
http://englandphoto.com/portfolio//

[dnanian]

Hi, Thomas. Welcome!

It's pretty difficult to maintain a bootable volume that's shared with files that aren't part of the backup: in general, this is *not* something I recommend that you do.

Instead, I'd suggest that you partition the external drive into a backup volume and a data volume, and then target files as appropriate to their proper locations.

Partitioning using Disk Utility will erase the drive. If you don't have a location to move the files to before you partition, iPartition from Coriolis Systems can do it "live" with your files in place. (It sounds, from your description, that you have erased the drive before, though.)

Once that's done, you'll target the backup to the backup volume, and you can use Smart Update to keep it up to date and bootable.

[Tullio]

But can I smart Update a CCC clone (no additional files on that drive in addition to the system) with SuperDuper?

[dnanian]

Sure. It's just a drive -- it'll update fine, and the end result will be an exact copy of the files selected on the source.