For the Pro's: Experience with Carbon Copy Cloner

Hi everybody,
I am a professional musicproducer. I use my MAC (G5, 2,7MHz DP 4GB RAM) every day many hours as my main working tool. So I cannot afford a loss of my system disc. If the disc fails some day, I do have to have a copy of it, that I can connect and go on working immediatedly. CCC is the perfect tool and i thank Mike Bombich for this efforts.
My tests were as follows:
After having cloned the system disc to a firewire drive successfully, I checked that I can boot from that drive, as long as the system disc is still in its place, connected and working.
Then I tried the worst case scenario: I plugged my system disc off (bus- and powerplugs pulled out), simulating a harddisc crash with loss of the complete drive, and looked what happens. You have to press the "Option" key during power up of your MAC, and the system will search and show the available drives. I marked the cloned system and started. It worked! Everything looked the same as with a start from the internal drive.
My question was: what exactly works and what not? Here is my report (I checked only LOGIC PRO 7.1.1):
I can start the programm, I can open all of the songs - with some restrictions. A logic song has a lot of links to a lot of audio files. In my case, EXS instruments and EXS samples are on the internal drive, recorded audio is on a seperat drive. Logic of course can not find those on the (no more existing) internal drive any more, so I am asked to perform a search. But after all, the song is complete and working. The entries in the Project Manager database, that show the dependencies of instruments, songs and audiofiles, point to the internal drive - so the Project Manager is of no use anymore. But in practice, this is a minor problem.
Now to my next question, concerning authorisations: I tried the "Waves" plug-ins: Yes, they work! And I tried the plug-ins of UAD, (they use a PCI DSP card): they work too! Only with the TC-Electronic plug-ins I was not successful, i got an "Error -1" - whatever that means. (I forgot to check "Autotune")
All told, I am very happy with the Copy Cloner! It is "the" application for my purpose! Thanks again to Mike and Andreas!
Thomas

My own tests were less than satisfying: third-party plugs (in my case, NI) often don't like you messing with the disk they're installed on.
After I restored to a clone, the B4 plugs, for me, refused to work. They demanded a reinstall (which, as all NI users know, is a royal PITA).
In my case, having to reinstall a particular plugin was not the end of the world... after all, 45 minutes lost is better than rebuilding a system from scratch.
But the lesson remains: an "exact clone" of your disk is never a 100% guarantee of immediate uptime, as you too discovered.

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