[X-Newbies] Hard Drive Backup Questions

[Randy B. Singer]

On Nov 27, 2007, at 2:15 PM, Thomas McDermott Jr wrote:

>    Just curious about creating backups as mentioned below.  If I
> "clone" my macbook drive onto an external drive will it preserve my
> Itunes playlists and ratings or would those have to be recreated?

Ideally, if you use good cloning software, your clone will (just as  
it sounds) be identical to the original in every way.

There is some controversy about the importance of metadata and if a  
clone that has not preserved metadata is a good clone.  See:
http://blog.plasticsfuture.org/2006/04/23/mac-backup-software-harmful/

That article is now somewhat out of date.  SuperDuper! is now not the  
only cloning program that preserves metadata.  I know that since that  
article was written, Prosoft's Data Backup 3 now preserves metadata.   
There is an all-new version of Carbon Copy Cloner, that does "block- 
level disk-to-disk clones" and reportedly it preserves all metadata.

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Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html
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