Added the following to my original question from August, found at the bottom of this page, which probably got lost in the shuffle. Hopefully this will generate a response from someone who's used it successfully without the results I got???
OK... Finally took the time and got the nerve to clone my X boot partition to my Firewire drive-- Am not sure the results were as they should be--here's why? [Please feel free to comment on any of them!!]
First, I put the few items that were on the target partition in a separate folder and named it 'Original b/u items'.
Then DC'd on CCC and chose the 'Source' and 'Target' disks. At that point the files to be copied appear on the right. Herein lies the confusion: The directions say that one doesn't need to backup a number of files at the root level which include 'etc', 'tmp', 'var', 'automount', 'mach', 'mach.sym' and 'DS_Store', among other. The only one that showed up on my list was the 'DS_Store', which I deleted.
After the clone, all of the ones mentioned above, with the exception of 'DS_Store', are visible on the Target drive. I would love to know why, assuming that they're usually invisible and I don't see them on my original drive??
Last question: In his list of files, as alluded to above, Bombich says, "The 'Volumes', 'Network', and 'dev' directories should also be recreated prior to booting from the cloned drive." How do you do that and where are they? It's supposed to be done before booting from the cloned drive--but I didn't...
Now what???
-- one last oddity. When I booted from the 'clone', my Kensington Orbit didn't function normally, i.e., with it's usual aplomb. The 'Mouseworks' program was available and seemed to have all the correct settings but it was 'as slow as molasses'.
Would appreciate hearing from anyone who has had experience/success with CCC. In other words, what did I do wrong???