I ran into a problem using CCC to use a cloned external drive to do an incremental update on a MacBook air.
Not quite sure why my idea doesn't work - possibly because I'm moving from SL to Lion.

Situation is this:

MacBook pro on SL 10.6.8
Did a CCC clone to an external drive.
Then used that clone on the external drive to move all my data to the MacBook air when I fist booted up on Lion with the MacBook Air

So far so good.

Now in the one week or so since I did that, I used the old MacBook pro with SL to do some additional work - emails, etc.

Today I did an incremental beck up using CCC from the MacBook pro to the external - that worked fine.
Now I want to do the incremental back up from the external (which is now up to date) to the MacBook Air on Lion (which is a week out of date)
I can select the external drive as my source drive, but I cannot select the MacBook Air drive as my destination drive, it just doesn't show up in the pull down menu.

Now what?
Any suggestions what I can do to bring the MacBook Air up to date?

I suppose I could use the brute force method, erase the MacBook Air drive completely, reinstall Lion and then do the migration the way I did it a week ago.
But that is a lot of work - is there a better, faster, easier way?

Thanks

Are you booting from the MacBook Air? You can't restore to the drive you are booted from.

Well yes....

All I'm trying to do is bring the data up to date - leave the OS alone.

So could I boot the MacBook Air from the Lion USB stick I made when I was struggling getting Lion on the 13-inch MacBook about a month ago and then do the incremental CCC clone?

You just need to be booted from a volume that isn't being affected / modified by CCC, is basically the bottom line.

Trouble is that I don't have one....

I tried booting from the Lion USB stick I made when I installed Lion on the 13-inch MBp. That gets as far as the Apple logo and just sits there.

Then I decided to see which start up disks come up on the MBair. Well, the Lion USN stick did not, but to my surprise, the 10.6.8 clone did!
So I said what the heck - if the Mac thinks it can use that as a start up disk who am I to argue.
Booted up on that - the Aoole logo came up, so did the little spinning wheel beneath it. Then after a short while the screen went blank.
I could see that the Mac was trying to access the Lion USB stick because its light was flashing every once in a while, but I couldn't get the screen back to see what was happening so after a few minutes I just shut doen the MBair.

And if I use the recovery drive it sounds as if I end up downloading all of Lion again???? since the Mac wants to connect to the internet...

So right now I don't see a viable option to update the MacBook air other than deleting everything, reinstalling Lion and then using MA.

Why can't you plug the external into the Air and then boot from the external, by holding down the option key on the Air at startup, select the external and then update the HD on the Air?

Why can't you plug the external into the Air and then boot from the external, by holding down the option key on the Air at startup, select the external and then update the HD on the Air?

Basically because the external is a clone of SL (from the MBpro) and the MBa won't boot off an SL external - at least I don't think it will.
I mentioned that I tried that in my post just above - oddly enough, the external drive with SL does show up as a valid start up disk on the MBair (2011 model) and the apple logo comes up when I boot, but that's as far as it went trying to boot that way.