Well, from the point of view of time, cloning by booting from a different volume is not the easiest way. The easiest way is to clone from the boot volume.
And, in my eight or so years of experience using Mac OS X's DU for cloning, up to Snow Leopard and now with Lion using CCC, cloning from the boot volume works just peachy fine. And I never bother to close down the internet connection either. Unlike Tacit, I don't bother to close down all the apps I've just been using. So what if Text Edit is open and so is Safari? Makes no difference.
After doing a clone, I always test it by booting from it for a test day. Never found a problem.
I'll happily and thankfully bow to Ganbustein if he can produce a good sized sample of competent Mac users who have had trouble cloning from the boot volume. Even better, if that sample was statistically significant. (Most samples aren't.)
But without some negative data on cloning from the boot volume, warnings against it are ... to put it politely ... just unsupported opinions. And they look really foolish to some of us empiricists who have been cloning from the boot drive for years without trouble.
Empirical data is what counts in everything -- wonderful theoretical opinions unsupported by empirical data are fun to contemplate and possibly the ringing bells for future improvements, but nothing to take seriously in their unsupported clothing.
As Ganbustein said elsewhere in these forums, let's get real.
I don't recall seeing an 'RHV' back at the MacFixIt forums, but there were frequent threads there about unbootable clones. Same at macosxhints. Or —if the clones
were bootable —the other fun thing that happened is that utilities like DU and DW would
refuse to repair the original while booted from the clone. (which was one of the primary reasons for the clone in the first place... not mere backup, but a boot drive from which to repair the HD when things got borked up).
The main reason a cloned OS refused to repair a mounted original was that it somehow believed that it was still booted from the original. Some "link" seemed to exist between the two. [the clone operation had worked "too well" for such purposes.]
Tons of times i had to advise folks to **install** an independent OS for emergency booting. Booting into the same
"exact" OS that we want to repair or restore is problematic.
For real.
