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Old 02-10-2004, 01:32 PM
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dnanian dnanian is offline
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Quote:
So, if I make a safety clone with the "Safety clone – shared users and applications" option, I only need room on the backup safety partition for everything OTHER than the user folders and applications folder, right?
Yes, and some slack space for swapfiles, temp files and the like. Note that some applications -- Apple's, for example -- need to be copied to ensure that any software updates applied to them are isolated to the clone.

Don't cut it TOO close.

Quote:
I'm leaning toward building my PB12 the old-fashioned way, piece by piece, rather than copying the contents of my PB17 verbatim. This is not because I'm worried about using SD, but rather because I'm not so proud of the condition of the files on my 17, and not sure I want to "infect" my new 12 with those problems.

Are there specific folders outside the user folder, such as Root\Library, which would be good to copy verbatim from the old machine to the new? I want to cut down on re-entering registration/serial number info but I don't want to jeapordize the integrity of my newly installed system.
Boy, that depends on a lot of different things. Some apps store things in /Library/Preferences or /Library/Application Support, but they also usually need other things left around, too.

If you're going to be partial cloning for the purposes of moving data from machine to machine, I'd isolate your copied data to /Users. It's a bit of a pain, yes, but safer.

Note that if you're just copying stuff like this, you can just plug the machines together with Ethernet cable. It's easier, if you're creating a whole new "platform".

Be very careful to ensure that your user ID is the same on both machines. Otherwise, your permissions are likely to get messed up...

Quote:
Since most of what I care about backing up is in my user folder, the safety clone mode won't be backing that up. If I use the "Backup – all files" to make a full backup is there any way to do incremental (changes only) backup to that full backup instead of having to do a full backup every time? I couldn't quite figure this out from the documentation, but, again, the problem is probably me.
It's never you: if you don't understand, it's because I didn't do a good job explaining it. Seriously.

Anyway: the Safety Clone is not a "backup": its purpose is to isolate the system and applications from potential problems.

Regular backups can't be done with only changed files, but stay tuned...
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