Restore question -- Why didn't it work?
 

I've been faithfully using SuperDuper! for about 6 months to keep an up to date bootable clone of my internal HD on a FW hard drive. It's always been bootable, which makes me all warm and fuzzy inside, but when disaster struck I couldn't help but feel a little let down by the program I had so much faith in.

The main reasons I purchased SuperDuper were to have a bootable, cloned backup and also be able to restore this to my internal HD without screwing up Time Machine backups (I was referred to SuperDuper when CCC had issues with Time Machine).

So my hard drive died this past weekend and I thankfully had a very up to date clone on my external. The new drive came and I installed it, and then I went to pour all the contents of the external back onto internal.

here is what i did, and please let me know if this is not correct (although I could not find any documentation on the restore process anywhere :\)

-Booted to the backup drive
-Once in OS X, opened up SuperDuper and attempted a clone from the firewire HD back to the internal HD
-All seemed to go well (except it seemed I magically had 5GB more free space on the new drive than I did with the old drive)
-Tried booting from the internal drive and immediately got a kernel panic at the white screen with the throbber and Apple logo
-Attempted same process a second time, with the same exact results
-Last thing I tried was restoring via Disk Utility using the backup drive as the source
-This failed halfway through without explanation, but worked the second time I tried it
-Finally got booted into OS X on my internal drive and ran a Time Machine backup where it demanded to back up 80 GB out of 100 GB thinking it was all new data (it wasn't).

So can anyone tell me what went wrong here? I really do not want to have to go through this again. Is there any posted documentation on how to restore?

I have to send my MBP in for repair (SuperDrive broke) and I had planned to reformat my MBP internal HD before I sent it and then clone it from the backup drive after the repair, but that isn't looking like such a great idea right now.

Yes, there's documentation about how to restore in the User's Guide ("Recovering from a disaster". Unfortunately, I have no idea why you got a kernel panic; that would generally indicate you had hardware problems or low-level software issues at the time... perhaps your internal HD is failing?

Doubtful. It's brand new, SMART status is verified etc.

I read the restore part in the manual and it says to follow the same steps that I tried. It flat out did not work, twice. So it wasn't me that screwed it up. Can anyone tell me why my supposed clone is 5GB less than my internal HD?

The source version of the copy was the same, both times. Kernel Panics aren't going to occur in general terms because the copy was 'screwed up', at least not in a way that would resolve itself, so I think something was wrong with your hardware, or a driver, at the time -- and perhaps a power cycle cleared it up. It's hard to say, though, without the actual panic log.

The copy is smaller because, as explained in the "What's going to happen?" section of the UI, we don't copy temporary files, swap files, some caches, etc -- things that have no real meaning across a restart, or are specifically recommended to not copy by Apple.

Is there anything different about the way Disk Utility performs a restore than SuperDuper?

Sure -- but it's hard to know what, of course. But they're both working with the same base set of files... and SuperDuper! copied those originally.