View Single Post
  #1  
Old 03-23-2008, 09:16 AM
Moses3d Moses3d is offline
Registered User
 
Join Date: Feb 2008
Posts: 7
Sizes: disk, partition, backup... Any thoughts?

Hi there,

I has digged the forum, but has not found an answer to a simple (at first sight) question. This relates to sizes: disk size, partition size, backup size.

Right from the beginning, I am NOT going to speak of ANY OTHER type of backup rather than ONE-TIME BOOTABLE (meaning: system installed on the system HD, fine-tuned, then cloned to an external HD and made bootable - end of story. No more backups to this HD, no additions in a week's time or so. Just a recovery measure: bootable clone of the system drive, made once and for good).

Now the question itself. I guess, it would be better with an example. Let's say, the INTERNAL SYSTEM HDD is 300 Gb. The complete system (fine-tuned, with all updates applied, all necessary apps installed, etc.) takes up 10 Gb. Here, the user files are NOT included or considered at all - they are not the part of the story and have no relation to the whole thing.

The EXTERNAL HDD (where the system bootable clone would go) is, say, 500 Gb.

So, we have:
System HDD: 300 Gb
System itself on the system HDD: 10 Gb
External (target) HDD: 500 Gb.

Now, the question: to use SD! to clone the SYSTEM from the system HDD (that is, the 10 Gb data load), do I need to format my TARGET HDD in such a way, that the TARGET volume would be 300 Gb (the same SIZE as my system HDD) or I can simply create an 11 Gb partition (10 Gb to accommodate my system data and 1 Gb just in case - for the OS to have room to work when cloning and to make sure that the 10 Gb piece actually fits there).

1) 300Gb (10Gb used) => 10Gb TARGET

or

2) 300Gb (10Gb used) => 300Gb TARGET ?

(obviously, in (2) it is a waste of room...).

In other words: what is the relationship between SOURCE drive SIZE, DATA to be cloned SIZE and TARGET disk/volume/partition SIZE? Remember, we DO NOT consider evergrowing data sets which require more and more room when the backup is updated. No, we are speaking about a one-time action to clone a completely set-up and fine-tuned system to another partition.

Any thoughts? Or, maybe, some experience? I am about to do this (I mean, fresh install Leopard, all my apps, update and fine-tune the system (no user data will be placed on the disk) and then partition my external FW HDD so it has a partition of exactly the same size as the to-be-cloned dataset and then use SD! to clone and make it bootable). But if anyone has already done this, maybe you would share?

Thanks in advance!
Reply With Quote