Got stuck yet before upgrade to 10.11 really started

[Mac2013orlater]

Our upgrade to Captain (from Mavericks) been postponed for long time should start these days
but the process got stuck because it unclear how to safe Mavericks backups.

From the point of time on when upgrade to Captain starts the existing Mavericks backups
are planned to be used for roll-back if upgrade fails. Or if upgrade completes successfully
but some time later user files need recovery. That means the plan is for Captain backups
to start from-scratch on blank volumes, or in blank sparse bundles.

For this the plan is to collect all Mavericks backups to one single USB external hdd.
These are existing Mavericks backups
* Time Machine, backup in sparse bundle on NAS in local network
* Time Machine, backup on USB external hdd
* Copy Carbon Cloner, bootable clone on USB external hdd (encrypted)
* Copy Carbon Cloner, clone in sparse bundle on NAS in local network
* Recovery HD clone on USB external drive produced by Copy Carbon…
For all above two USB external hdd’s and two volumes on NAS are used.
The goal is to collect duplicates of all them on one further USB external hdd.
Duplicate of bootable clone on USB hdd should retain the boot ability.
It is acceptable if it loses the encryption.
The plan is also to create on the collective usb drive appropriate number of volumes,
each for every type of backups (here five).

It is iMac late 2013. Is the aimed goal possible to reach?
Which tools are to be used? Cloning the Recovery HD to another USB drive seems
to be a challenge, but not only this.

 

[DeltaMac]

There's not any great purpose in cloning the Recovery HD, as that does not hold any data that might belong to you, and would be installed or replaced when you install/reinstall OS X.
Remember that the Recovery HD partition requires an internet connection to reinstall OS X.

A much better tool to keep is a bootable copy of your OS X installer, so you could use that to install El Capitan, or a copy of the Mavericks installer that you can then use to easily go back to Mavericks if you ever have the need to do that.
The stand-alone bootable OS X installer has all the system files on the partition, and therefore does not need an internet connection for an install.
You can keep 8GB USB flash drives with Mavericks, and El Capitan bootable installers.
Each are very similar to the Recovery HD, but again, do not need an internet connection for an OS X install.

 

[Mac2013orlater]

Thanks for you opinion and valuable hints. Please give some 2 days of time to think it over.

In the meantime let's go back to actual question, Recovery HD is just one element of the whole.
diskutil partitionDisk... seems to be name of the first station in my long journey.
The usage of APM[Format] | MBR[Format] | GPT[Format] is somehow unclear.
What is the difference between e.g. GPTFormat and GPT?
The one just short form of another one, nothing more?

 

[DeltaMac]

The man for diskutil certainly isn't as clear as it could be.

http://www.theinstructional.com/guides/disk-management-from-the-command-line-part-2

But, if you look at other sources that show how to use those terminal commands, or show examples how to setup and use the diskutil command, you will determine which format (APM, or MBR, or GPT) is used, and the rest of the diskFormat command follows to determine the format scheme (APM, MBR, or GPT), the name for the volume, and the volume size - for each volume that you want to set up.

The man does not show "GPTFormat", but does show "GPT[Format]"
I am not a command line wizard, but there are a few commands that I frequently use. The standard usage of most commands is fairly straightforward - but not always very intuitive to setup correctly the first time.
In this particular instance, I am fairly sure that the brackets mean that there are options that must be set there, and is not simply entered as "GPT[Format]
So, to answer your questions: GPT is the partition scheme that you would use, the term GPTFormat is not a usable term, and "GPT[Format] just shows that there is more to enter than just "GPT"
Does that make sense?