Does this mean that you need to have three drives: the active volume that has the cloning software running, the inactive source (also bootable) and the target drive? I kind of doubt that this is a standard setup unless one has a desktop with two drives and an external. Are you guys doing it that way?
Admittedly this is non-"standard" practice, but every disk/drive i own (or have ever owned since the early 90's) is
partitioned. The externals have at least one bootable system, and my internal HDs have at least two. I suppose another alternative is a bootable flash drive. [one could also use Disk Utility to do a "restore" (clone) while booted from a system dvd perhaps, but i reserve dvd booting for full-blown emergencies when no other option is available.]
This part of the discussion is mostly about *full* clone operations. Once that has much been achieved successfully, all the "incremental" updates (which both SD and CCC offer) are safe enough in my opinion.
That all goes for Time Machine too i suppose. I was just wondering to myself how they design those programs to run while users are busy renaming, re-saving, and/or moving stuff around in realtime...
while the backup is still underway. I guess they have error handlers that silently avoid potential conflicts and deal with them somehow.
That's why a full clone is more susceptible... because it takes so long to complete. If it all happened in one second, not much will have changed from location to location. But the fact that it takes a few minutes increases the chance that "something" might get out of sync (e.g., when one item backed up early on depends on the state of something backed up later in the game). In most cases it might not matter, but there's always a chance that one day . . . it might.
