Re: System Drive Clone by Scott Anderson on Jun 11, 2009 at 2:30:15 pm
Yes, you can absolutely do this. I've heard very good things about Carbon Copy Cloner.
I suppose the major issue is that you end up copying over your bad settings along with the good. If you have a rock-solid, stable system, it should work out fine. However, you should try and obtain replacement discs for your damaged ones ASAP.
There's no telling what kind of foibles September's Snow Leopard will bring in regards to Final Cut Studio. Or, FCS 3 if that comes out on the heels of SL.
So far, all we've seen of Quicktime X mostly has to do with i-apps, but the announcement of GPU-based h.264 decoding (+encoding?) makes me think there's big changes under the hood waiting for the next round of 64-bit pro apps to take advantage of.
Re: System Drive Clone by Phil Hoppes on Jun 11, 2009 at 3:02:16 pm
Yea, and finally with SL one would hope that there is a proper API so Adobe et. al. can finally port their apps to be a true 64 bit application and one would hope that FCS 3 would also be a true 64 bit app. One has to wonder what is going on over there at 1 Infinity Loop however when you look at the Pro laptop line with dropping the express port on the 15" MBP and only having 1 FW port on the 17". Thank goodness I have an older MBP so I can capture from a camera and write to an external FW drive as I have 2 FW ports. Granted, my desktop is my workhorse but I still depend very heavily on being able to run FC on my laptop and in particular, capture with my laptop.
Re: System Drive Clone by David Wegley on Jun 11, 2009 at 3:16:30 pm
I would agree with Scott about the backing up the bad stuff. I personally would archive my user profile by backing up the home folder for your account or accounts and then reinstall the OS and apps. I know it takes longer but if you take something that is already broken and put it on a different hard drive, it's not going to help a lot.
Re: System Drive Clone by Dustinn Craig on Jun 11, 2009 at 5:13:56 pm
Yes, thank you all for responding!
I will be using Carbon Copy Cloner, and have been for using it since 2004. The Mac Pro is just a few months old, and I've been pretty strict with using it only as a work machine and have installed just the apps I use daily, so I think the system is solid.
As for the side thread on the Macbook Pros losing the express slot, I just can't believe that. I don't know who on earth thought that would be a good idea. I use that port on the road for Esata connections, my offload of footage from the SxS cards, and to hook up to FW800 raids.
Re: System Drive Clone by Bill Davis on Jun 11, 2009 at 6:10:42 pm
For what it's worth, any card slot, or for that matter PORT on any computer should be considered temporary. Some of us who've been around for a long time have gone through this so many times that it's an article of faith not to expect the next box to have all the connections of the previous one.
Personally, from my first ever hard drive (an 11 MEG Corvus with a 3pin serial interface) through today, I've seen probably 15 connection "standards" and god knows how many storage solutions - Zip, Jazz, DC2000tape, etc. etc. etc. come and go.)
It's just inevitable.
BTW, isn't the system backup thing EXACTLY what Time Machine was brilliantly designed to do?
If your system goes rogue, just go back to before that happened and the problem is solved.
And even cooler, if you run something like DiscCatalog Maker on your externals, before and after you do the restore, and dump the results into the Document Compare function of WORD - ALL the things that changed between states will get flagged.
Re: System Drive Clone by Phil Hoppes on Jun 11, 2009 at 10:02:35 pm
Yes on Time Machine with one exception. Time Machine kicks off all the time and may in fact back up a bad installation. You might be able to remember or not what specific time/date was golden vs what was not and then again you may not. Also, I don't know about you but I get the proverbial "Time Machine Failed" message more than I care to think about. And with the wonderful diagnostic messages it supplies (none) usually there isn't bubkus you can do about it. I tend to let it go until I can't take it any more and then I wipe my Time Machine drive and start again, which usually fixes it for a while. With CCC I make an exact copy to a bootable drive. If a Mac OS update hoses my system I can have it back running by simply swapping my CCC drive with my boot drive and I am back running in the time it takes to crack the case and swap drive. Time Machine can't do that.
