Carbon Copy Cloner Icon   

I want to backup multiple machines or hard drives to the same hard drive

 

Sometimes backing up your data to a single external hard drive is just too messy and difficult to organize. Suppose, for example, that you have three computers in your household, and everyone would like to back up to the same external hard drive. Where do you put each computer's backup? The solution that you choose depends on whether you want to be able to boot any of the machines from their backup, and whether you are willing to pre-allocate a specific amount of space on the backup drive for each computer

"I want a bootable backup for each computer on the same hard drive"

To create a bootable backup for each computer, you will have to create a partition for each computer that you want to back up. Note that you cannot boot PowerPC and Intel-based Macintoshes from the same external hard drive, so if you have a mix of PowerPC and Intel Macs, you will need at least two backup hard drives.

Learn more about partitioning a hard drive for use with Carbon Copy Cloner

"I just want to back up data — I don't need a bootable backup, and I don't want to partition the backup disk"

A good solution in a scenario such as this is to back up to a subfolder on the target volume, or to use disk images as the medium of your backup. A disk image is a single file residing on your hard drive that contains the entire contents of another hard drive (except for the free space). When you want to access the contents of that filesystem, you double-click on the disk image to mount the disk image as if it were an external drive attached to the machine. Carbon Copy Cloner 3 leverages disk images to provide you the flexibility of storing several complete backups on a single shared external hard drive. Note that while disk images themselves are not bootable, you can mount them and restore their content to a physical hard drive to produce a bootable, exact replica of the original.

When you want to copy the entire contents or a selection of data from your hard drive to a disk image, select "New disk image..." or "Choose disk image..." from the target menu. If you want to restore a drive from a disk image backup, boot from a drive other than the target, select "Restore from disk image..." from the source menu and locate the disk image. Choose the drive to which you would like to restore from the target menu.

Learn more about backing up to and restoring from disk images
Learn more about backing up to a subfolder on the target