Cloning a Media Drive?

[alansky]

Can SuperDuper be used to clone a media drive—that is to say, a drive that does not have an operating system installed on it? The documentation seems to refer exclusively to "bootable clones". I just want to make an exact copy of a drive full of music and video.

Thanks!

[dnanian]

Sure, as long as the drive is formatted as HFS+.

[alansky]

Since SuperDuper seemed able to do it, I went ahead and used smart update to make both drives identical. What's odd is that, after cloning, the amount of space used on the two drives is not identical when I compare Get Info windows; but the folder sizes displayed in each drive's Finder window are exactly the same on both drives. Any comment?

[dnanian]

Spotlight, potential .MobileBackups folder, etc.

[alansky]

There is no Mobile Backups folder, no iTunes folder... But Spotlight is set to index one drive and not the other. Could this cause the discrepancy?

[dnanian]

.MobileBackups is hidden - certainly Spotlight can be the cause, yes: it's quite large, generally.

[alansky]

Sounds reasonable. Thanks!