Cloning… it’s a time-honored way of transferring all your system files from one drive to another and ending up with a bootable copy identical to the original. It’s great for performing backups and makes transferring your system to a new drive a snap…

Well… maybe not that second one anymore…

Cloning can bring over stuff you don’t want.

One of the infrequently-mentioned additions to Lion was “MobileBackups,” which is is effectively internally-saved Time Machine backups. When your Mac laptop isn’t connected to your Time Machine drive, it still keeps track of changes and saves them to a hidden folder on your hard drive. If you need more space in the “visible” portion of the drive, the OS deletes the older backups. Then, when you reconnect, it transfers the data over and deletes it from your internal drive.

The problem is that it doesn’t always work that way. Article Continues…