[SOLVED] How many bootable partitions can I create and use on a 4 TB drive?

[wordsmithereens]

I would like to create bootable images of 8-10 Macs on a single dreive (in addition to the other regular backups).

By way of example, I have 8 Macs of various flavors, with boot drives from 120 gb to 500 gb. Can I create a partition for each of them, and create a bootable drive in each partition? I could use CCC or SuperDuper or HDClone as needed.

Thanks!

 

[spinningstill]

I suppose I would ask why you need bootable drives for all those machines? I haven't used CCC for multiple drives but I am sure it would work as would TM.

 

[wordsmithereens]

It's kind of a corner case. I will be moving across the countryand I want to make sure I have a bootable copy of all the computers for the family in one place so I can carry it with me while the computers and other items are shipped. So, I'd like to have a bootable partition for each of the systems on one large drive it possible.

(all Mac machines, though I may do similar for a few stray Windows machines.}

 

[spinningstill]

With CCC you should be able to attach your external and create a new task for each computer. With TM, as far as I understand you just ad your external to each computer and it will make a back up and identify it as the named machine. With both CCC and TM, you can choose what you want and don't want to be backed up if space is an issue. With CCC, they recommend you create a folder first on the external for each machine, then choose the folder as per each machine you are backing up.

 

[wordsmithereens]

I'll check that out. I think SuperDuper will do the same, but with disk images - which may also be worth a try.

Thanks!

 

[wordsmithereens]

RESOLVED.

The answer is YES.

So far I have been able to create and boot from 6 different SuperDuper! backups (from 6 different Macs) on a 4 TB La Cie Rugged Thunderbolt/USB3 drive. Drives range from 512 GB to 120 TB, and MacOS versions from 10.11.6 to 10.14.3

Created partitions on the fly with Disk Utility from each machine as I created the backups.