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best cloner for mac hard drive?

J

j2048b

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 18, 2009
817
39
Cali
I am running outa space on my mac hard drive due to apps and stuff, and wanted to ask how do you you clone the drive so that i can then use that drive as my new boot drive,??

AND

which program is the easiest to us, fastest, more reliable and cheapest?

also can u clone say a drive i have movies backed up on? Cant you also use time machine to back it all up to a big set of back up drives?

thanks!
 
I have never used it, but multiple threads here always seem to suggest Carbon Copy Cloner is the way to go.
 
carbon copy! thanks guys!

will give it a try!

how easy is it to use and how do you set it up for nightly stuff as well? or is that on the web site?

thanks!
 
I have a license for SuperDuper and I have also donated to Bombich (Carbon Copy Cloner). They are both awesome. SuperDuper is easier to use and setup; CCC has a few more features such as bootable backups over the network. I use both.

As for regular backups, both can be scheduled for daily backups, but personally, I think it's better to do regular backups with Time Machine, and to make occasional bootable backups with SuperDuper or CCC. My $0.02.
 
Carbon Copy Cloner is pretty easy to use you pick your Source Disk and then your Target Disk. It gives you various options to choose from. Then you just push the clone button and it goes to work.

Afterwards you can Save the task and set it to run whenever you want it too. I have my cloning tasks run in the middle of the night.
 
CCC (free) and SuperDuper .

Does CCC have something like SD's Smart Update ?
Big time saver, updates an existing clone in minutes .
 
barmann said:
Does CCC have something like SD's Smart Update ?
Click to expand...

Of course it does. It's called incremental backup.

I used both CCC and SuperDuper and came to the conclusion that there is nothing better than CCC. Awesome piece of software!

My machines boot up at night, backup all partitions, and go to sleep 30 minutes later.
 
And with CCC when you do an incremental backup you can have it create an archive folder with the items that are no longer on the source.
 
gold standard =

1)CCC

2) Superduper

3) TM

4) offsite service


all four if you really need the info.

but the first 3 are free and even if you buy the superduper upgrade it is under 30 bucks.
 
Last edited:
j2048b said:
I am running outa space on my mac hard drive due to apps and stuff, and wanted to ask how do you you clone the drive so that i can then use that drive as my new boot drive,??

AND

which program is the easiest to us, fastest, more reliable and cheapest?

also can u clone say a drive i have movies backed up on? Cant you also use time machine to back it all up to a big set of back up drives?

thanks!
Click to expand...

I've cloned a few OSX boot drives with SuperDuper and it's always worked perfect. The price is right also (free for the basic version)........................ :p
 
barmann said:
CCC (free) and SuperDuper .

Does CCC have something like SD's Smart Update ?
Big time saver, updates an existing clone in minutes .
Click to expand...

Transporteur said:
Of course it does. It's called incremental backup.
Click to expand...

I'm using CCC to do a clone of my SSD boot drive to an external. I just learned that you don't have to do the incremental option with CCC to have it do an update. The way he words it, it makes it sound like doing the Backup Everything with Delete Items would erase the target disk each time, but it doesn't. This is from the support staff:

It sounds like you would like to boot from your source drive (most likely your internal drive) and create an exact copy on an external drive. Further, you would like CCC to be efficient and only copy over the new or modified items. To accomplish this, Backup Everything with Delete items... checked will do exactly what you want. First time a full clone, subsequent backups it will only copy modified/new items.

If you chose Incremental and leave the entire drive selected, it will actually do the same thing as a Backup Everything clone. However, since people can deselect items, an incomplete, non-bootable clone can result. To try to cut down on confusion, we recommend that people use the Incremental backup mode for non-bootable backups.
Click to expand...

So I just leave it on the Backup Everything with Delete Items option, and it will only copy over changes since my last clone.

-Kevin
 
Thanks for all the feedback in this thread: I got CCC and did my first clone of my boot drive onto my data drive - handy if I ever need to restore my system if something goes wrong. I still have my TM backing up the system and data, and the clone along with.

I'm looking to move towards a safer setup than what I have right now (pretty much just my TM drive), but I'm wondering what role a maintained clone could play. The plan was to have four 2TB drives in the four bays, in RAID 10 for data, and a 120GB SSD for boot. I still want to have TM in an external, but would it be paranoid to work a clone into this as well? If it could fit in that system, what would the best implementation be?
 
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I used Carbon Copy Cloner to migrate to a new HDD.
Easy to use.
Perfect copy. Even took the trash contents.
 
I just use Disk Utility To "Restore From" and "Restore to" and set the target disks, and then Go, it's built into the system, no need for additional software, and it works perfectly. I have used this many times to restore a disk in it's entirety to another volume. Restores everything on the disk and if it's a bootable volume, your disk that you restore to will be bootable as well.
 
There have been several nasty bugs in Carbon Copy Cloner, that at least with 10.6, would quietly corrupt some system files and result in trouble down the road. They are probably fixed now, but...

A block level copy with Disk Utility is always the best and most problem free way to clone a drive.
 
I wonder if on a straight clone, is carbon copy cloner actually doing anything any different than disk utility restore?
 
rtrt said:
iirc you cant do a block level clone of the disc that the MP boot volume is on tho?
Click to expand...

True. Depends why you're cloning the drive. When I worked as a tech and I needed to clone one machine to another I used a block level copy. File level copy gets a bit more tricky. I knew of a lot of different programs people used for backup.
 
The docs are a bit murky, but in many cases (smaller target disk, incremental copy), CCC and SuperDuper do a file-level copy. That said, they both take great care to ensure that the copy is a disk image. The only thing you can't do (which I learned the hard way) is switch freely from one to the other for incremental copies - they each have a different set of files they omit in the copies, and if you take an incremental backup made by one, you can't use it for an incremental copy for the other.
 
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