Backup without erasing?

[jefferis]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Hm. Interestingly enough, I apply this sort of thing to a Safety Clone all the time, which is -- in essence -- a secondary drive that you're booted from at the time of installation.

When you're booted from a secondary drive, it's mounted at /, and that's where the installer would put things -- it's much harder to try to figure out what the "non-secondary" drive is, and then locate its mount point, and then copy to it...

If I can fix the non-boot internal drive situation, which is now a complete backup clone of the boot, what would you recommend I do to create a working safety clone? I assume that if I create this clone, that disk 2 becomes the boot drive, but user files are still stored on the original boot? I guess, I am confused that if there is only one set of user files, how is recovery easier if you install a change of applications or whatever and it makes an incompatible extension in the user/system files??

Thanks
Jeff