Some Time Machine and Backup queries, can you help?

[Fishrrman]

"But a new MBP could run an old CCC clone of SL externally from a SSD, you would assume?"

No, wrong again.

How many times do I have to repeat this?
You CANNOT boot a newer Mac using an older version of the OS.
(It doesn't matter WHAT drive it's on, you just can't do it !!)

By "older version", I mean a version of the OS that existed before the newer Mac was shipped.
There have been very, very few exceptions to this rule since OS X was introduced.

You CAN take a drive that has a cloned version of an older OS and MOUNT IT on the newer Mac's desktop. You can read/copy data files from it, apps, etc.
But you CANNOT "boot" from it.

Comprende?

 

[Peter Franks]

No, wrong again.

How many times do I have to repeat this?
You CANNOT boot a newer Mac using an older version of the OS.

By "older version", I mean a version of the OS that existed before the newer Mac was shipped.
There have been very, very few exceptions to this rule since OS X was introduced.

You CAN take a drive that has a cloned version of an older OS and MOUNT IT on the newer Mac's desktop.
But you CANNOT "boot" from it.

Comprende?

Oh go on, repeat it a few more times for us...

How would you mount it?

 

[ignatius345]

I'm a fan of doing both because there are different recovery scenarios. The "replace everything" restore is a lot more rare of an occurance (fortunately) than the "I lost or accidentally messed up a file I was working on" restore. Time Machine is easier to use for versioning in that latter scenario. You plug it in and forget about it, which is great. And when it runs out of room, it prunes out the oldest backups. TM is a very good "set and forget it" system capable of restoring everything. All this about booting from your backup is fine, but if you have a true hardware loss or failure, you're going to be very happy to have a Time Machine backup, trust me.

At the same time, I like to do that clone every few weeks via CCC to a couple portable hard drives I keep offsite in case of total disaster at home.