Clone external drive to internal drive...

Hi there guys,
My iMac was working perfectly yesterday, but for some reason, iDisk isn' t syncing now. At all. I have repaired permissions, trashed pref files, disabled syncing, enabled syncing, set up new user accounts etc etc, but the only thing that worked was when I booted from external - it synced just fine.
I want to know whether it's worth moving the external over to the internal and copying things over from there/cloning the internal from my FW external?
Or should I just boot up from external for the forseeable future?
I made a partition on my external and created a bootable clone on a partition with 1GB more space on it than the internal.
The internal shows 97.8 GB (105,020,411,904 Bytes) are used, but the external shows only 86.6 GB (92,987,826,176 Bytes) used and it's supposed to be a clone!
The Internal has a size of 148.9 GB (159,907,630,080 Bytes) yet the external has a size of 149.9 GB (160,927,055,872 Bytes) so obviously I worry that if I clone the external over to the internal, that it might not fit.
Also, I use SuperDuper!. Would I have to erase the internal drive before I started to clone it from the external?
Is there anything else I can do to save the iDisk syncing? It works just fine on my other iMac and my MacBook (which uses the same router).
Thanks.

Solved.
Booted up from external. Cloned internal to match external. Booted from internal. Done.

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Just drag and drop the iTunes library from the USB drive to the Time Capsule.

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Hey ! Thanks for the help everyone ! David.Austin.Allen I followed your instructions and went with the option given by iTunes to, create new Library or Choose one. I had previously Consolidated, moved all my files to my Clone external drive. Now when i click on iTunes it read's " Folder containing iTunes Library could not be found please create a new one or choose one! I think i am pretty much set thanks to you! One last question though. After all that. Is my iTunes Library still clogging up space on my macs drive even though iTunes is disabled on my internal drive, btw i did erase my original iTunes Library as the support page on here stated ! Wondering if i answered my own question !>? Or will SuperDuper being that the drive is a clone somehow copy everything back into my internal drive ?

Hey, can i clone my Macbook Pro internal hard drive and then paste it all onto a formated external hard drive, then make the Mac use the external as the primary hard drive?

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If what doesn't work?
If cloning your internal drive to the external drive is not successful, I expect CCC will tell you so. Assuming that doesn't happen, you will have a bootable replica of the internal drive on the external drive once CCC has finished.
You can then do any of several things:
1. Replace your internal drive with a much larger one (320GB or 500GB, or even larger), and clone the external drive's contents onto the new drive so you'll have all your data in one place. Note that if you do this, you'll also need to buy an external drive that's large enough to back the new internal drive up on.
2. Boot from the external drive as a temporary measure while you clear at least 30-40GB of data off the internal drive, allowing you to keep using it and saving small amounts of data to it. The external drive will then contain the only copies of the files you've deleted from the internal drive, so you'll need a seond external drive large enough to back both the other drives up on.
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Internal versus External drive for Backup?
Suggestions/comments as to the pros and cons of each approach.
Looking at purely doing Clone of main drive.
As a side thought I am noticing topics on issues with mounting drives. Does having the drive internal make this a non-issue?
Thx in advance.
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If you use internal and the machine is stolen your backup is lost too.
If it's for backing up for Business use, your insurers may insist on offsite storage, secure offsite storage that is of a backup or they wouldn't pay up.
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I have an iMac connected to an external hard drive that is showing signs of age, and I fear that it may be failing. I'm going to replace it today.
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Hi! HERE is some formatting info. HERE is SuperDuper, HERE is CarbonCopyCloner, HERE are the instructions for using the Apple Disk Utility and HERE is additional backup info. Tom
Message was edited by: Thomas Bryant

I have a power pc (g5) computer that I will soon be replacing with a current i5 or i7 mini. How do I transfer the Time Machine files from the internal hard drive on the G5 to an external drive that I will later use with the Mini?

I have a Power PC G5 computer that I will soon be replacing with a current i5 or i7 Mini. How do I transfer the Time Machine files from the internal hard drive on the G5 to an external drive that I will later use with the Mini?

Hi, likely the easiest is to just poll the drive & get something like this...
Get MacScan...
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/networking_security/macscan.html
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/NewerTech/U3NVSPATA/
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http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
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http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/

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I thought this would be a question easily answered on the WWW and easily found via search engines, but so far no luck, hence this question.
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Good info Csound1, and thanks.
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Thanks again; wonderful forum here with very smart people.

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External drive doesn't show volume when used internally (and vv)

I have an early 2011 MBP 17" where I have replaced the optical drive with the 750G hard drive that came with the computer. in the hard drive spot I put in an SSD. Recently I got a 1T 2.5" drive and I want to copy all the files from the internal 750G to the 1T and then put the 1T in the optical drive bay to replace the 750G.
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How did you backup your internal hard drive to the external? In order to boot a Macintosh has to be partitioned using the GUID scheme and then formatted as Mac OS extended Journaled. Both operations are performed in Disk Utility. You can clone your drive to to the external using a utility such as Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper. I'm not sure what you expect to accomplish without install discs. When you clone a drive you're making an exact copy. You shoud probably look at calling Apple and requesting a set of original discs or purchase a full install of Snow Leopard at http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC573/mac-os-x-106-snow-leopard

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Upgrading to a clone on an external drive

I want to try out Mavericks. I am currently running Snow Leopard. I was thinking about cloning my internal drive to an exteral firewire drive. Can I use the clone to install Mavericks and test it? How exactly would that work? Do I boot on the cloned drive, then go to the App Store and get the Mavericks update?
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Niel wrote:
You install Mavericks on the external drive; this can be done with or without cloning your existing system to it. If you choose not to clone Snow Leopard, specify the external drive when setting up the Mavericks installation.
(98293)
Are you saying I just need to setup an external drive, go to App Store, click on the Mavericks update and then what? I don't want it to overwite my Snow Leopard. Does it give you an option of where to install? Will it mess with my Snow Leopard internal drive? The reason I wnated to clone it was that my Apple loops are on my internal and I thought having them on the clone would let me just see that (if I boot to it). Can you point me to any KBs on doing this?
Thank you

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Hello,
My 20inch iMac's internal drive died and I'm trying to re-install Lion on an external drive. If I could get the Lion DMG file I think I'd be all set but am not sure how to do this. It doesn't look like the Lion Recovery feature is supported in my older iMac. And I have Leopard installed on the external drive but there's no AppStore to download the Lion DMG file.
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Without a bootable backup/clone or a Time Machine backup of your previous Snow Leopard installation or a saved copy of Lion's install app, you'll have to upgrade your Leopard volume to Snow Leopard (10.6.6+) so you can waste another hour or more DLing the Lion thing again.

MBP internal drive failure causes external drive probs. Weird...

I've been booting off an external drive for some months now. I figured it would save wear on the internal drive, and when my boot drive eventually failed (the external one) it would be quicker and a lot cheaper to swap that out with another external one than to have to change the internal drive. I use FW800 and not seen any performance hit.
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I tried rebooting. It would only boot from the external drive, and only if I held down the option key and selected a boot from the options that appear. Otherwise just the apple symbol and an endless twirly. It wouldn't boot from the internal drive +at all.+
Eventually I booted from the SL disk and ran disk utilities. To my surprise the internal drive was corrupted in some way and couldn't be repaired. I wiped the drive and restored it using Time Machine (stored on yet another drive). Everything then worked fine, except for the slow wi-fi.
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Thoughts anyone?

clicked 'solved' but the credit went to the wrong place!
it's solved, thanks to clinton:
Re: Re: clone no longer sees MBP internal drive

Best external drive to use to clone MacBook Pro

About a month ago my 2011 Macbook Pro hard disk crashed. Luckily, I was able to restore everything from backup stored on my Time Capsule using Time Machine. Moving forward, in addition to using Time Machine, I would like to clone my Macbook Pro to an external drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. Could someone please advise exactly what kind of external drive I should get? My Macbook Pro's internal drive is a Seagate 500GB SATA laptop drive. I'm running Mavericks OS X 10.9.4. Thank you in advance for your help!

You really don't need Seagate's software to use the external drive with your Mac.
Open Disk Utility in your Applications > Utility Folder and depending on what you want to use the Seagate for..... simply re-format it.
For example:
If you want to use it for Time Machine, erase it and format it Mac OS Extended.
If you want to use it to share photo's, music and doc files between PC's and your Mac, erase it and format it MS-DOS FAT-32.
If you want to make a bootable clone using Disk Utility, CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper, erase it, set the Partition Scheme to GUID Partition and the format to Mac OS Extended.
Cautioning that, formatting will erase all the data on the drive.
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Clone external drive to internal drive...

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