Geir's Blog - Carbon Copy Cloner

Carbon Copy Cloner

[ geir ] 17:27, Sunday, 27 April 2008

I dropped my laptop. Twice. It was after a weeklong trip to Brasil and Argentina. 6 airplanes, a zillion bus and cab trips, 2 train trips, 1 talk at FISL, interview 5 companies for offshoring/staff augmentation. I was tired.

After the first drop, 10% of the screen was broken - the left side. Got another and was going to do a transfer when I got home. On the way home, it fell out of my bag again. Now over 50% of the screen didn't work.

Solution? Carbon Copy Cloner. Attached the two laptops together w/ a FireWire 800 cable, held option on startup to let me boot off the drive in my broken laptop, used CCC to clone the old drive to the new laptop.

4 hours later, had a complete clone, and got back to work. Perfect. Recommended.

I've done basically the same, but with a completely broken motherboard, by removing the HD, and using a USB/Firewire mixed enclosure. Except that I use linux and, thus, used different techniques to recover /home and parts of /etc only, I got it going very fast too.

Ditto for a desktop, where I just moved the HD physically and booted the old soul into a new body, so to say. It actually felt like a reincarnation of sorts.

Funny how nowadays hard disks are often the most durable part of a computer, while they were the most fragile 15 years ago.

--Santiago Gala, April 27, 2008 06:37 PM

Geir, you should try Superduper sometime http://tinyurl.com/6krpz. It can back up, transfer & even make a bootable copy of your system on an external drive. So you could travel with a pocket drive & borrow a Mac where ever you arrive.

--Steve Allen, April 29, 2008 05:24 PM