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I am using Chronosync to make a complete bootable backup of my OS X 10.6.4 machine to an external USB drive. It takes a LONG time (even incrementals) and part of the problem is the 8GB sleepimage. Can I safely exclude this from the backup? I realize that in case of a disaster requiring the use of the cloned drive, I would not be able to wake the Mac from sleep, but would need to reboot, but the point is to not have to reinstall all of my work from a Time Machine backup.

Thanks, Ralph

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Have you found Chronosync a better solution for creating a bootable backup than Carbon Copy Cloner? – donut Sep 18 '10 at 4:10
Not particularly. I am not averse to using free software, but Carbon Copy Cloner seems like 'nagware'. I was more than willing to pay for the software (I bought Chronosync), but not to donate to CCC without receiving a copy that would stop nagging. – Ralph Sep 18 '10 at 16:58
Nice... just learned a new word: nagware. It's one of the many practcal differences between free software and Free Software. – user39559 Sep 24 '10 at 12:43
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Your sleep image is typically just a dump of your machine's memory onto the hard drive so that in the event of a power loss you can resume slightly faster than a boot process. You can safely ignore it.

Typically in my backups the only thing I grab is my Users folder. Occasionally I might be interested in things in /Library/Preferences, but rare is that event. There's nothing outside that system that can't be recovered through other means. As for applications in /Applications, part of my backup scripts dump an ls of that directory into a file, so I know what I had there in the event of a drive failure, but I don't actively back up what can be reinstalled / redownloaded later. 'Tis a waste of backup space, especially since with new program versions, etc., that data changes quite often anyway.

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Thanks. I actually have several automatic backups (I'm paranoid :-)) including Time Machine and JungleDisk (for my company source code). I want to add a "whole" disk bootable backup in case my HD fails. I will update it once a week. I bought a copy of Chronosync to do that one. – Ralph Sep 17 '10 at 13:52
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