Easily make copies of your hard drive

To safely backup your hard drive, you can create a clone of it, which you will synchronize and backup on another drive with Carbon Copy Cloner

Everything you need to clone and backup

With CCC you can schedule automatic backups, which saves you the hassle of taking care of the backups yourself. Just decide on what day of the week and time you want CCC to work and let the program do its job.

More knowledgeable users will also like being able to run pre and post-flight shell scripts, checking the list of items removed after a clone, and creating a disk image.

Simple to use

Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) is an app that creates clones of your disks, so you can worry less about losing your data. The application features a simple interface, from where you select the drive or folders to backup and the target drive to save to. I’ve found that you’ll have to make sure a local disk is connected to your Mac so the program can start up though.

Conclusion

Carbon Copy Cloner is a very good program to clone and backup your drive. Very much recommended.

This update is fully qualified on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, OS X 10.7 Lion, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, and now OS X 10.9 Mavericks. CCC now offers volume-specific advice about how to enable full disk encryption. Enabling encryption on an OS X backup volume, for example, involves several steps that must be executed in the correct order. If full disk encryption is not supported on a particular volume, CCC indicates exactly why not. We have also added answers to some frequently asked questions about full disk encryption to our documentation. Fixed an odd edge case in OS X in which you can mount a network volume using a short user name, such as “johnny”, but the remote host will place the long name in the filesystem URL that is returned, e.g. “Johnny Appleseed”. Previously, this difference would cause CCC to believe that the network volume was mounted with other credentials altogether, and CCC would refuse to use the network volume under the assumption that permissions issues would ensue. This update addresses that issue, CCC will now immediately evaluate the filesystem URL of the network volume that is returned in reponse to its mount request and update its own internal reference to the user account as appropriate. Fixed an issue in which CCC may refuse to allow the user to schedule a backup task to a disk image that resides on a FUSE volume. Fixed an issue in which a scheduled task could load in a hung state if the task configuration file was corrupted. Changed to accommodate some Drobo devices having a problem storing extended attributes larger than 1KB. Rather than reporting that the Drobo device is unable to accommodate the extended attribute, these devices report that the destination volume is full, even when there is adequate space available. This update catches this edge case and reports it in a more meaningful way. Changed to explicitly refuse to create a Recovery HD partition if it can positively identify the selected volume as a Drobo device. Drobo’s proprietary data moving techniques do not play well with dynamic partition changes, and Drobo specifically does not support the modification of partitioning outside of the Drobo Dashboard. Fixed an OS X 10.9 Mavericks-specific display anomaly in the list of items to be copied. Fixed an issue in which the OS rarely, but occasionally, does not send an “application finished launching” notification to the scheduled task helper tool, causing task initialization to fail. Fixed an issue in which the OS rarely, but occasionally, does not send a distributed notification that a task has finished, resulting in the task appearing to hang at the end despite the fact that it had actually finished. Fixed the option to “Silently skip if the source or destination is missing”, CCC will no longer proceed with that backup task if the missing volume reappears before the next scheduled run time. The task will instead run on its normal schedule. Fixed the “LOGIN” SMTP authentication mechanism for Apple’s iCloud SMTP service which recently started to return invalid challenge responses to SMTP clients, causing some CCC email notifications to fail (for users that use iCloud SMTP accounts with CCC). This version of CCC works around this problem by preferring the “PLAIN” authentication mechanism instead. Fixed an issue related to Google’s recent changes to its Gmail SMTP service that introduced a problem with sending email notifications to multiple recipients. This update resolves that problem.

Changes

• This update is fully qualified on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, OS X 10.7 Lion, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, and now OS X 10.9 Mavericks. CCC now offers volume-specific advice about how to enable full disk encryption. Enabling encryption on an OS X backup volume, for example, involves several steps that must be executed in the correct order. If full disk encryption is not supported on a particular volume, CCC indicates exactly why not. We have also added answers to some frequently asked questions about full disk encryption to our documentation. Fixed an odd edge case in OS X in which you can mount a network volume using a short user name, such as “johnny”, but the remote host will place the long name in the filesystem URL that is returned, e.g. “Johnny Appleseed”. Previously, this difference would cause CCC to believe that the network volume was mounted with other credentials altogether, and CCC would refuse to use the network volume under the assumption that permissions issues would ensue. This update addresses that issue, CCC will now immediately evaluate the filesystem URL of the network volume that is returned in reponse to its mount request and update its own internal reference to the user account as appropriate. Fixed an issue in which CCC may refuse to allow the user to schedule a backup task to a disk image that resides on a FUSE volume. Fixed an issue in which a scheduled task could load in a hung state if the task configuration file was corrupted. Changed to accommodate some Drobo devices having a problem storing extended attributes larger than 1KB. Rather than reporting that the Drobo device is unable to accommodate the extended attribute, these devices report that the destination volume is full, even when there is adequate space available. This update catches this edge case and reports it in a more meaningful way. Changed to explicitly refuse to create a Recovery HD partition if it can positively identify the selected volume as a Drobo device. Drobo’s proprietary data moving techniques do not play well with dynamic partition changes, and Drobo specifically does not support the modification of partitioning outside of the Drobo Dashboard. Fixed an OS X 10.9 Mavericks-specific display anomaly in the list of items to be copied. Fixed an issue in which the OS rarely, but occasionally, does not send an “application finished launching” notification to the scheduled task helper tool, causing task initialization to fail. Fixed an issue in which the OS rarely, but occasionally, does not send a distributed notification that a task has finished, resulting in the task appearing to hang at the end despite the fact that it had actually finished. Fixed the option to “Silently skip if the source or destination is missing”, CCC will no longer proceed with that backup task if the missing volume reappears before the next scheduled run time. The task will instead run on its normal schedule. Fixed the “LOGIN” SMTP authentication mechanism for Apple’s iCloud SMTP service which recently started to return invalid challenge responses to SMTP clients, causing some CCC email notifications to fail (for users that use iCloud SMTP accounts with CCC). This version of CCC works around this problem by preferring the “PLAIN” authentication mechanism instead. Fixed an issue related to Google’s recent changes to its Gmail SMTP service that introduced a problem with sending email notifications to multiple recipients. This update resolves that problem.

Have you ever wanted a simple, complete, bootable backup of your hard drive? Have you ever wanted to upgrade to a larger hard drive with minimal hassle and without reinstalling your OS and all of your applications? Have you ever wanted to move your entire Mac OS X installation to a new computer? Then CCC is the tool for you! CCC makes these tasks simple by harnessing the Unix power built into Mac OS X.

In addition to the features that CCC has provided in the past, version 2 offers synchronization of the source and target as well as scheduled backup tasks. Now you can setup a regular backup regimen that occurs in the background, even if you are not logged in! Version 2 also offers enhancements for lab administrators, including the option to run pre and post-flight shell scripts, the ability to modify the list of items to be removed at the end of a clone, and the ability to create a disk image on the fly. One of CCC 2’s most exciting features is the ability to create a NetBoot image from a fully customized Mac OS X installation.