Use CCC to create a bootable backup

[donl1150]

I am running a MacBook Air that has been upgraded with a 1 TB SSD. It runs great. I have Parallels on the system running Windows 7 for several of my small business needs - Quicken, FileMaker Pro, TurboTax and Microsoft Office. The original drive is now in an enclosure that I want to use as a bootable backup. Since the original is only a 250 GB and my new 1 TB already has used up about 300 GB, I have to be selective in what gets cloned on to the enclosure drive.

First I want to clone ONLY the necessary Mac system files, Parallels and Windows 7. Can someone advise what files/folders I need to make the drive bootable and contain only those listed? Thanks

 

[BrianBaughn]

What is taking up the space? Movies? Music? Photos?

 

[donl1150]

I am not quite sure but my guess is all of those, with photos likely the biggest offender. I think there duplicates upon duplicates scattered all over the drive in different folders. I’m not the most organized in that area and I have tried a few different duplicate finders but probably with not the success that I obviously hoped. I would like to put all of my ‘data’ into a single folder near the ‘top’ of the drive and then there would be all of the necessary sub-folders beneath it. Then it would be easy to not only do backups but find things when I have the need. In the meantime, I want to have the bootable back up enclosure ready to go if I crash.

 

[BrianBaughn]

With CCC you can uncheck folders so that they won't be cloned. It would be best to gather all the folders with photos and put them into a single folder which you can uncheck. Same for movies. I wouldn't uncheck the actual Documents, Movies, Pictures, Desktop etc. folders that reside in your User Account folder. These are system folders. Uncheck a folder inside those folders.

How big is your Parallels virtual machine file? The whole thing will be copied every time you run the task in CCC. So...with your small backup drive you'll probably want to turn off "SafetyNet" for the CCC task. Keep in mind this will NOT keep older versions of files that have been changed since the last time you ran the task.

You should be running another backup in addition to this bare-bones CCC task.