Swapping out hard drive - Time Machine vs Super Duper vs Carbon Copy

GGJstudios said:

The one drawback to using SuperDuper! is that it will not clone the recovery partition, whereas CCC will.

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Wow, I didn't even realize that. Thanks for pointing that out.

Ddyracer said:

No, that's not the problem. It's just not a weekly backup like it says, it saves hourly backups and then slows down and eventually saves a week worth. Don't like that.

I rather have it just update once a week and stay that way. Oh sure it's handy, but it sounds like it slows your system down.

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I think the explanation was not quite right.

Time Machine takes backups every hour. So after a day, you have 24 backups. As these backups get older, it keeps one and throws away the other 23 hourly backups. After a month you have 24 hourly backups of the last 24 hours, plus 30 daily backups. As the daily backups become older than 30 days, Time Machine throws away six out of every seven weekly backups.

So you always have: Hourly backups of the last 24 hours. Daily backups of the last 30 days. Weekly backups as long as your hard drive space lasts.

gnasher729 said:

I think the explanation was not quite right.

Time Machine takes backups every hour. So after a day, you have 24 backups. As these backups get older, it keeps one and throws away the other 23 hourly backups. After a month you have 24 hourly backups of the last 24 hours, plus 30 daily backups. As the daily backups become older than 30 days, Time Machine throws away six out of every seven weekly backups.

So you always have: Hourly backups of the last 24 hours. Daily backups of the last 30 days. Weekly backups as long as your hard drive space lasts.

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All good but i don't want an automatic backup. Once a week, then get out of my sight. Spotlight is indexing often enough i don't want more crap like that you know.

Ddyracer said:

I heard about it. Sounds like TimeMachineScheduler which is a hack. Rather not take the risk even if isn't. I don't trust it, because i also don't trust TM not to screw something up.

CCC is the way for me.

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Hi,

One question, can CCC or Super Duper help me with the below issue ?
I upgraded my HD to OWC SSD on my MBP mid-2012 non retina.
After copying all the files from HD to SSD (using disk utility) everything worked fine.. except Microsoft applications ask for Product Key.I have lost my Product key. When I put my old HD back the Microsoft applications work fine ?

Will cloning using CCC or SuperDuper help ?
I think not.. since the Microsoft applications will still think that its a new machine and ask to enter a product key.

Please help.
This sets me back 139 USD on top of the OWC SSD cost.

with love from macster11

Weaselboy said:

Nope... no clone app is going to help with that. What has happened is the MS apps have detected the new UUID of the hard drive and now knows you have changed hardware, so you will need to reregister the applications.

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In case this is still useful to macster11 or someone else:

If it's really based on the UUID it should be possible to check what the UUID on the old drive was and set the UUID on the new drive to be the same (just don't have both drives connected to the same computer when they have the same UUID, since that would create confusion for the OS). I am, however, assuming it's correct that it's based on the UUID and not the hard drive serial number or something like that. It does seem a little hard to believe that it would be relatively easy to work around Microsoft's product key. But hey, maybe changing the UUID will work.

Just do a search on how to lookup and change the UUID. I've set the UUID as I please in Linux, so I can't imagine it's not possible in OS X. It will almost certainly involve some sort of command line utility however.