Disk Images and External Drives - PLEASE HELP

Hi all,
I've got to a point where i can't afford to keep buying expensive drives to work form with Final Cut Pro X so decided to just work from several high spec drives and then back them up on other cheaper drives, reformat the high spec ones and start again.
Not really understanding how disk imaging works I hoped I could carbon copy mountable and read and writeable drives (in this case a thunderbolt lace SSD) on to a cheaper mass storage, wipe it and start again. I hoped it would then appear on the drives top level just as the drive appears on my desktop, and that I could access it if needed or port it back to a single drive at a later date? Is this possible? Can anyone help? So far everything I've tried has failed.
One thought I did have was to create several partitions on the cheaper mass drive and duplicate it on to there? But I can't find any help or instruction for this online and need to make sure its write before I go deleting old projects.
Attached are a picture of what I have (the disk image file) and what I was hoping to create (a mountable replica of a working drive on an external HD)
Any help greatly appreciated.
Robin

You can research the terms disk image and back up for several hours. That might not help.
None of the back up routines I am aware for for video and large media files use any compression or bundling systems like .dmg. I think your best bet is to make one-to-one copies of your files to your cheap drives. If you need the older projects, you copy them back to your working drives. That's pretty much how it's always been unless you are have a nice NAS RAID with mirroring to another rack of drives.
The problem with cheap mass storage is no that it's unreliable. It's just not QUITE as reliable as more expensive systems. Having a copy of your work on a disk that might or is likely to fail is almost the same as not having a backup at all. but there is a point of diminishing returns for all of us in this business. This trend toward 4k and 8k, and FCPX's inability to manage media efficiently, means we all must add TB of storage for every project. A friend of mine includes a couple of TB drives in his fees. The client pays for and gets the drives.

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Carbon Copy Cloner
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G:\Music\My Music
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C:\Documents and settings\Lee Robinson\My Documents\My Music\
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Drives and Disk Images refuse to mount
http://www.macfixitforums.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=tiger&Number=791320&Forum= &Words=CharPatton&Match=Username&Searchpage=0&Limit=25&Old=6months&Main=791320&S earch=true#Post791320
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2. You wrote: "On another discussion I initiated one poster said that when creating a bootable external drive it is important to uncheck the square for "Ignore Ownership". I just installed OS X 10.4 on a LaCie 120 GB external Firewire drive and after the installation process noticed that the "Get Info" panel shows the box "Ignore Ownership" checked. Is there a problem ?"You do not want "Ignore Ownership" checked on a bootable volume, i.e. a volume on which you installed Mac OS X. That installation may not work properly.
3. You wrote: "In case there is, shouldn't OS X have unchecked this option as it installed itself on this particular drive ?"I don't know. I've never tried installing Mac OS X on an external volume that had "Ignore Ownership" checked before installation.
4. You wrote: "What does the option "Ignore Ownership" mean and why/when should I use it ?"See "Mac OS X 10.4 Help: I don't have permission to use a disk. The only time I would use this feature is if I had a volume on an external drive, e.g. FireWire drive, that needed to be accessed and written-to by multiple users of the computer to which that external drive was connected. The volume in question should contain only data — not a bootable volume, i.e. one with Mac OS X installed — and one should also be prepared that anyone could add, delete, or modify files on that volume since permissions are ignored when "Ignore Ownership" is enabled.
FYI: When asking multiple questions, numbering them individually is helpful. Then someone can respond by number to link the answer to the question, vs. quoting the text as above.
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Dr. Smoke
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