Any recommendations for partition/disk cloning programs for Mac OS 10.2 and 9.2?
This one - Carbon Copy Cloner - is free but I'd be happy to pay if there is something folk especially recommend:
http://software.bombich.com/ccc.html
We want to use such a program so we can recreate identical boot partitions so that our reviews are carried out on a level playing field.
Thanks in anticipation
Bob C
Hi Bob
There has never AFAIK been an equivalent to Partition Magic in the Mac world.
This is because the Mac OS has always been totally different to MS-DOS.
As Mac volumes in OS 9 (and before) just have names rather than any fixed identity (D: etc) as in DOS, it has always been possible to immediately create mutiple partitions on any drive with software like Disk Copy (or Toast) as and when required by any particular program. To produce multiple OS-level mountable partitiions has always had to be done when a drive is initialised/formatted - using Silverlining Pro/Hard Disk Toolkit/Remus etc.
The way the OS can move the 'blessed' system folder contents around the drive - apart from the directory, the directory backup and a very small kernal (some parts of which are put in a number of tiny invisible extra partitions) - means that in the Mac world there has been no need for cloning in the exact sense of the word (ie making an exact sector-by-sector copy).
Disk Copy and Toast (and possible Retrospect backup s/w) do allow to limited degree this sort of exactitude, in certain circumstances, but I doubt any Applescript Utility (which is what Carbon Copy Cloner appears to be) will deal in sector-by-sector directory management, but will rather just allow the OS to deal with the infrastructure as it wishes. However given identical newly formatted drives the OS should behave in a consistent way. Thats a guess though.
OS10 is a whole new ball game. I suspect the Carbon Copy Cloner team's expertise is as state of the art as anyone else outside of Apples own OS 10 development team. But they are not writing a machine code program which will directly address the drive hardware (which I suspect would be how Partition Magic is written), they're using AppleScript - albeit in a sophisticated way and letting the OS get on with it.
I'm afraid this isn't an answer to you request - its just a suggestion as to why us Mac guys maybe cant come up with a better answer. You would need to talk to an Apple Engineering team guy for that I suspect.
Regards
Paul
Paul,
Thanks for the thoughts!!!
Anyone else got any more of 'em?
Bob C