Carbon Copy Cloner - anything better?

contoursvt · #1 December 7th, 2004, 11:47 PM

Ok I'll be honest. I'm a PC guy starting out in the mac world - or well starting in OSX, not really macs. Today I was using the above software to image a 6 gigabyte boot partition from one mac to another via Firewire. The source was a G4 733 with 1gig ram and the destination was a dual 1gig with 1gig ram and a 120 gig drive. It took honest to god like 2 hours to image the partition.

I'm used to using Norton Ghost via network or disc to disc or disc to image..etc. Its like 10x faster if not more. Isnt there a non shareware app that is the equivalent of ghost? Say one that would read the drive structure and recreate it on another drive (partitions and all) and do so quickly?

On my 3Ghz p4 system (granted its got two 36gig 15K scsi drives) it takes about 3 mins to ghost my 4 gigs worth of boot drive from an image file which is on the 2nd scsi drive. Even if I find something 1/4 of this speed, it would be fine.

Thanks in advance guys

Tommo · #2 December 8th, 2004, 03:36 AM

I use carbon Copy Cloner to back up and create images of multiple Macs to an external firewire drive. I don't think the software itself is the problem as I have just used it to copy a 140GB image and that took just under an hour.

In my experience it will take a longer if you select the 'Repair Permissions' check box or are trying to clone the disk you have booted from.

bobw · #3 December 8th, 2004, 08:27 AM

SuperDuper is supposed very good from the reports I've seen.

**fryke** · #4 December 8th, 2004, 09:27 AM

Looks like a similar feature set... Hmm... Any reports on its speed?

perfessor101 · #5 December 8th, 2004, 03:00 PM

I have used both SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner and as far as I can tell there is no noticeable difference in the speed. Which is not surprising since both are dependent upon the same Unix commands to do their thing. The speed of cloning is primarily a factor of the size of the system being cloned, the speed of the drives involved, the connecting bus, CPU speed, and RAM.

bobw · #6 December 8th, 2004, 04:05 PM

Using SuperDuper on a G4/1GHz, 1.25GB ram, 60GB drive, 12GB used, took about 28 minutes to clone the drive. Cloned drive boots fine.

contoursvt · #7 December 8th, 2004, 10:39 PM

Hi everyone, thanks for the quick replies. I'll try unchecking the 'fix permissions' options and seeing if that helps much. Other than that, I cant think of why it would be so slow. Also I guess I'll just stick to carbon copy since most are saying there is no speed difference between it and superduper.

**fryke** · #8 December 9th, 2004, 06:01 AM

I just tried to superduper my drive to an ASR-image and it failed with some copy-error on a Java archive of some sort... Back to CCC for now. However I must say that I like the interface of SuperDuper! (although I hate names with !s in them...) and would actually _like_ to use it. But if it fails the first time I try it, it's not for me...