ditto or just drag and drop

Using 'ditto' should be fine. Since you are on Tiger, even using 'cp' should work since it now handles resource forks.
But unless you are doing this from a script, drag & drop seems easier and just as good.

Note that the only reason you needed something like Carbon Copy Cloner was if you wanted to get a bootable copy of a hard drive - i.e. if you wanted to copy the system stuff and have it work the same as the original. For your own files, ordinary applications, etc, just doing drag & drop is fine.

Thanks.

Drag and drop it will be for now. I will just back this up not to my backup drive but my extra space.

I am anxiously waiting for a new CCC because the last bootable backup I have is (10.3.9) from when I upgraded to 10.4.

While CCC is unavailable you can just use Disk Utility from /Applications/Utilities to do the same thing. It's really as easy as dragging in your source (from the list of partitions at the left of the "Restore" tab) and your destination, and then telling Disk Utility to restore source to target. As per CCC I always erase the target before doing a clone (there's a button in the restore window to do this if you prefer).

In writing this I'm probably jinxing myself: I'm currently cloning my desktop machine to a powerbook. Confirmation upon booting the tiger-enabled laptop.

Paul

Bing. Go.

The technique described above worked perfectly to make a happy 10.4.1 powerbook from a happy 10.4.1 emac. And what a cute little beast he is.

Paul