[Darryl Ramm]

Lots does not seem good here. You only have one backup drive. You are suggesting trying out a new backup tool to the same drive... the danger of you destroying all your backups by making a finger mistake is real. (The most common cause of lost data is user error, not drive or other failure).

How big is the internal SSD? Go buy at least two external 7200 RPM drives that are at least a TB larger than the internal drive.. (that lets CCC keep deleted files in future). You can use a fast external SSD like a Samsung X5 if performance is critical (including performance as in you can boot off the clone and just get full work done), HDD are lower cost a better choice if you want to maintain longer term archives.

The questions about performance: It largely depends on the drive, but there is CCC overhead. I can backup a 2TB internal NVMe SSD to an external Samsung X5 Thunderbolt 3 NVMe SSD in about 40 minutes. A HDD might be several times slower. Add more time to carefully test clones work, are bootable etc. Why is any of this important? If you are in a rush to try creating a new backup on the same drive as time machine to rush to get to an Apple store appointment, that is a huge risk. Reschedule the appointment and get yourself organized.

If your premise is you have all sessions backed up and can live with receiving a erased computer back from Apple, then that is your choice. Hopefully you have time machine working correctly and understand how to recover sessions and/or user accounts using it and are OK living with the risk of having only one physical backup. ... I would not be doing anything like that.

You are asking about protecting other licenses.... again we cannot guess what you have. If your licenses are all on iLok keys then there is no license data to back up.