Itunes ?

Al, Herman's excellent response gives my reasoning for the clone operation using SuperDuper. Once it's set up, regular incremental backups become so easy that they are actually likely to get done. As well, familiarity with the SD process may encourage a user to adopt a regular backup strategy for the startup disc too.

As for the possibility of confusion between volumes, operator error is always a thrilling possibility. However the volume and its clone are allowed to have, and should have, different names and creation times. Also, on startup, iTunes will open the last iTunes library used. If that's not available, it will ask to be shown, or told to create, another. It's not likely iTunes will inadvertently get confused this way.

Excellent clarifications, Herman & Toby. Thanks. I believe that assignment of different names and creation times eliminates the possible concern I expressed about cloning.

Cloning programs that I am familiar with, in the Windows world, will usually duplicate absolutely everything, including what is known as the "disk signature" in the drive's "master boot record," which among other things identifies the disk to the operating system. In case you're curious, the kinds of problems that can lead to, especially if the drive being cloned is an OS drive, are described here.

Best regards,
-- Al

Thanks for an interesting read, Al. I don't believe SuperDuper cloning goes quite as far down into the disk structure when duplicating data as the Windows process does. For this reason one would have to consider the Windows cloning operation as more rigorous.

Cloning programs for the Mac were not even necessary before OS X. A simple drag and drop Finder copy would have been enough, previously. SuperDuper adds the extra operations required after the OS change, but the word "clone" is actually a popular usage, it seems.

Hi Toby,

It gets even more rigorous with Windows 7 and Vista, compared to XP which was addressed in the link I provided. And it has to be, or the clone of a W7 or Vista OS drive won't boot. Another reference that may be of interest.

But as you imply, the word "clone" can be used in various senses.

Best regards,
-- Al

Hi, I am sure you've found your. Answer by now, but if not here it goes. I made the same upgrade to my Mac mini which has made it finicky when it comes to external hard drives, I myself use the apple time capsule as my hard drive and after the upgrade the Mac mini no longer recoginized the files. What I did was delete all the files and redown loaded them again. Don't delete them in the trash, delete them off the Mac mini, and then reload the library again... Simple step... Hope this helps...