Cloning has been a popular way of creating external bootable disks. Now that CCC 6 can make full clones of disks for M1 Macs, is it a solution?
clone
The first full backup is performed as a manual backup, and largely occurs in file-by-file copying from source to the backup store. It is more efficient than to HFS+, but differences could be less than 10%.
Sparse bundles, sparse files, and sparse matrices explained in a nutshell, and how a sparse bundle could have a band which is a sparse file containing a sparse matrix.
Adds support for reporting whether a file is a sparse file, or has been cloned, in Big Sur.
New version searches for sparse files and clones, reporting their individual sizes and totals for the folder or volume examined.
Can APFS really store more on disk using sparse files and clones? Is there such a thing as a free lunch, or do these tricks have a cost?
APFS can ‘clone’ files when copying or duplicating them within the same volume. But how can you tell whether any given file is a clone?
Looking in more detail at newer tricks used by APFS on the data of files: sparse files, which can squeeze vast empty files almost to nothing; file clones; and compression, opening up in Big Sur.
Looking at what’s involved in updating Big Sur’s new Sealed System Volume shows what’s necessary for successful cloning.
What happens when you copy a large file to the same volume, or duplicate it, on the same APFS volume? Here are the answers.
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