Q & A

Can I create a bootable backup with ChronoSync? The short answer is, yes. However, it is not designed as a utility for cloning an entire hard drive. To have ChronoSync make a bootable backup you need to do the following: 1. Run ChronoSync with full administrative privileges. 2. Synchronize to a hard drive that has it's "Ignore ownership on this volume" setting turned OFF. 3. Execute a post-synchronization AppleScript that "blesses" the system folder on your external hard drive. Contact us at online support for more details regarding any of the above steps. We discourage using ChronoSync in this capacity, however. The main reason is that ChronoSync will collect information on every file it is trying to synchronize and stores this information in the synchronizer document. A bootable Mac OS X volume can easily contain hundreds of thousands of files, making for one very large synchronizer document! The technique ChronoSync uses for detecting changes in your files is overkill when all you want to do is clone your hard drive. Thus it won't be the most efficient of processes. A far better solution would be to use a tool that is designed specifically for cloning entire hard drives such as Carbon Copy Cloner. ChronoSync can be used quite effectively alongside a disk cloning utility. You can use the cloning utility periodically, such as after applying a system update or security patch, to ensure that your bootable backup volume is up-to-date. You can then use ChronoSync to frequently and efficiently synchronize just your working data files on the bootable backup. This combination would be far more efficient than simply using a cloning tool by itself for synchronization or using ChronoSync by itself for cloning.