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Carbon Copy Clone

Eldiablojoe

Eldiablojoe

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 4, 2009
952
70
West Koast
I have a MacBook from Christmas 2009. I'm very happy with it. I am using an external HD, a Western Digital Passport with 500 GB for my Time Machine backups. The MacBook seems to have a 250GB hard drive, but no firewire connection.

So far I have used up about half of my WD Passport external with Time Machine backups.

I have about 6500 photos and almost 12GB of iTunes music, and I don't want a catastrophic failure to cause me to lose it all.

In addition to the Time Machine backup, I'm considering using Carbon Copy Clone with an additional external hard drive for a complete backup.

I'm not very Mac or programming savvy, so I'm looking for an idiot proof method.

What do you guys think of CCC, and what size/brand external HD do you recommend? I think CCC has to have an HFS+ formatted drive. I don't want to keep it connected all the time, but I would like to occasionally clone the MacBook harddrive so I always have a fairly current bootable backup.

I appreciate the opinions of you guys with a lot more expertise than I have.
 
CCC is a reputable program. SuperDuper is another reputable one. CCC has the advantage in that it can do incremental backups so it only has to copy what has changed since the last backup.
 
I am pretty much in the same boat. When you use CCC, does it do a full and complete backup of everthing, so that if your primary HD crashes, you can just open up your backup HD and move forward? Thanks in advance.
 
Thanks Angelwatt. Can I keep the external HD unattached, and attach it only when I run CCC.

Based on my storage sizes above, do you have a recommendation for a good, properly formatted external HD to use for the CCC purposes?
 
Eldiablojoe said:
Thanks Angelwatt. Can I keep the external HD unattached, and attach it only when I run CCC.

Based on my storage sizes above, do you have a recommendation for a good, properly formatted external HD to use for the CCC purposes?
Click to expand...

I use Super Duper as my backup program and a 500 MB Western Digital External Drive. I have a new 27" iMac with a I TB Drive, but only am using about 100MB of it. Super Duper only needs the amount of MB that you use on your hard drive. Therefore, for me, a 500 MB external drive is plenty big. I do not keep my Super Duper external drive connected all the time and only clone my Internal Drive once per week.

I use another 500 MB external drive for Time Machine Backups, which I do keep connected all the time, but only update once or twice per day, as needed.

Hope this helps.
 
Eldiablojoe said:
Thanks Angelwatt. Can I keep the external HD unattached, and attach it only when I run CCC.

Based on my storage sizes above, do you have a recommendation for a good, properly formatted external HD to use for the CCC purposes?
Click to expand...

Only needs to be attached when you run the backup. CCC does have a scheduler and if it doesn't detect the destination it will defer the run until it has been plugged in. The size of your backup drive will depend on if you're just making a clone, or doing archived backups (where it keeps modified versions of files). For clone, just get the same size as the source. For archives, get double at most.
 
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