I'm interested in creating a clone of my Time Machine backups (the Backups.backupdb
folder) so that my local backup strategy isn't entirely dependent on the external HD being alive. My hope is that I can backup the entire Time Machine contents to a single file (a disk image, sparse bundle, I'm not entirely sure of correct terminology) and then upload this file to a service like Amazon S3.
Is there a method for doing so that is known to work well and result in an image file that can later be restored to an actual external disk and have all backed-up contents still be usable?
I have one caveat to my situation which might complicate things - I have about 25GB of other data in other folders on this external HD which I would like to not include in a clone. I've taken a look at SuperDuper and it seems like it would clone the entire HD just fine, but I don't see how to exclude files - and CCC doesn't even show the Backups.backupdb
as an option in it's file picker (even after following these instructions).