Carbon Copy Cloner vs. Super Duper-Which is better?

Weaselboy said:

Yeah... that's going to be too much to fit on two partitions (one a clone and the other TM) on one disk. I would just use one of your 1TB disks for the clone and another for the TM backup. That would give you plenty of room for now.

I would not try to exclude anything from the backup to save space. Like you mentioned, that kind of defeats the purpose of being able to use the drive to restore from.

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Ok I've clone my HDD with CCC which only backed up roughly 453GB which the Macintosh HD is roughly the same. Which i've ran myself into another problem i used one of the External HDD and which had some stuff on it that i wanted to keep i forgotten to check before i formatted it and it wiped the whole lot Any chance of a recover the partition before i formatted it. I have personal photos that mean so much to me

Weaselboy said:

You can try software like Disk Warrior to try and recovery the files. Or if it is really important there are companies that you can pay to try and restore your data, but it is not cheap.

There is no easy way in OS X to undo it though.

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I have borrowed my cousin's Disk Warrior (even thought he never used/open the package yet) and installed it how do i recover it any tutorial?

My quote: "P.S. BTW, is there a way to "see" the recovery partition on a drive without rebooting? This would make checking if it's there a lot easier."

Weaselboy said:

Yes... enter "diskutil list" (without the quotes) in Terminal and it will list all the partitions, including the hidden 650MB Recovery HD partition.

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Thanks for the tip about "diskutil list". That made testing a lot easier. I couldn't get Create-Recovery-Partition-Installer to work so I reinstalled Mountain Lion - it was easy! I'm used to doing clean installs which are much more fuss. I now have a recovery partition on my main internal drive.

Anyway, to answer my original question about whether the *free* version of CCC (3.4.7) will clone the recovery partition in Mountain Lion, I can say definitively: yes!

It worked like a charm. It poped up a window asking if I wanted to clear about 1 GB of space on the target drive to create the new partition - this is because I had already cloned to this drive before I had a recovery partition on my main drive; I was now updating that clone but adding the recovery partition.

-Bob

Cloud Backup

There seems to be agreement that we should use Time Machine and make a clone with CCC, SD, or DU but not many people mention off site backups.

One person asked about where a good place would be for off site backups. Cloud backup solutions are not expensive at all anymore. I pay $100 a year for unlimited storage, unlimited machines including gadgets and whatnot, for a single user. That's with Spider Oak whose main selling point is their security features where everything is encrypted on the user end and they don't even know your password. That's nice but I don't care. I like that their backups are 'versioned' so uploads are quick and you have potentially unlimited history....which includes a 'trash'. As long as you don't empty the trash in their app, anything you have ever deleted on your computer will be there backed up for you in a trash folder. There's other cloud backups that are good, but after switching to Spider Oak from a bad one (Just Cloud), I feel like bragging about it.

So I have incremental backups to an external, non-bus powered drive with two particians and to the cloud. All three backups are versioned, one I can boot from, one I can easily grab a versioned file from within seconds, and one is offsite (on the other side of the planet). Unless the Earth is completely destroyed, my backup scenario should be good enough. Maybe someone should start a cloud backup company with servers on the moon?

virtualbartek said:

There seems to be agreement that we should use Time Machine and make a clone with CCC, SD, or DU but not many people mention off site backups.

One person asked about where a good place would be for off site backups. Cloud backup solutions are not expensive at all anymore. I pay $100 a year for unlimited storage, unlimited machines including gadgets and whatnot, for a single user. That's with Spider Oak whose main selling point is their security features where everything is encrypted on the user end and they don't even know your password. That's nice but I don't care. I like that their backups are 'versioned' so uploads are quick and you have potentially unlimited history....which includes a 'trash'. As long as you don't empty the trash in their app, anything you have ever deleted on your computer will be there backed up for you in a trash folder. There's other cloud backups that are good, but after switching to Spider Oak from a bad one (Just Cloud), I feel like bragging about it.

So I have incremental backups to an external, non-bus powered drive with two particians and to the cloud. All three backups are versioned, one I can boot from, one I can easily grab a versioned file from within seconds, and one is offsite (on the other side of the planet). Unless the Earth is completely destroyed, my backup scenario should be good enough. Maybe someone should start a cloud backup company with servers on the moon?

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I agree off site needs to be a part of any backup plan. I my self use crashplan and I am very happy with their service.

Hey all, I was reading through this thread, just to see what people had to say. I purchased a license for CCC today, I've used superDuper! for the past several years without problems. I think the two programs do essentially the same tasks while CCC has some nice specific options that SD doesn't for example the Recovery portion as mentioned, being able to clone to an existing disk image or creating a new one. I noticed it has the option to clone to a remote computer.

The other thing I noticed was CCC has a menu agent giving i quick access, even when the application itself isn't open.

I too know what it's like to lose data, but with me, it was due to a failure during the backup I was backing up to a linux based server and the finder was having issues that day, and all my purchased audiobooks from iTunes got lost, and since apple doesn't store a copy of audiobooks in the cloud like music and movies and tv shows it means i would have to re purchases them. Since i was not happy with apple's policy for audio books I solved the issue by re purchasing the books i really wanted back on CD and not trusting iTunes for audio books until apple comes to the point where they will allow books to be stored in the cloud like everything else.

Anyway, the bottom line is both programs this thread is directed at are great programs, it's about personal preference and individual needs for the software in different circumstances.

I know this is an older thread but I had a bad experience with Super Duper this week and thought people should know.

The short of it is, Super Duper didn't work for me. While the developer was responsive he was ineffective in getting the software to work for me. I spent hours trying to get it to work to no avail. So within 24 hours of paying for it I asked for a refund and was refused!!

Buyer beware, if the software doesn't work for you for whatever reason, you cannot get a refund! This is bad business plain and simple.

I ended up downloading a free trial of Carbon Copy Cloner and it worked the first time with no hassle and did what SuperDuper couldn't do for free! I will pay for CCC if I need it again. But I will not ever use or endorse Super Duper.

If anyone want full details as to why it didn't work let me know.

bzollinger said:

I know this is an older thread but I had a bad experience with Super Duper this week and thought people should know.

The short of it is, Super Duper didn't work for me. While the developer was responsive he was ineffective in getting the software to work for me. I spent hours trying to get it to work to no avail. So within 24 hours of paying for it I asked for a refund and was refused!!

Buyer beware, if the software doesn't work for you for whatever reason, you cannot get a refund! This is bad business plain and simple.

I ended up downloading a free trial of Carbon Copy Cloner and it worked the first time with no hassle and did what SuperDuper couldn't do for free! I will pay for CCC if I need it again. But I will not ever use or endorse Super Duper.

If anyone want full details as to why it didn't work let me know.

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I would be curious as to know why it didn't work, and what it is you wanted to do. I own both programs and I bought super duper first then later as I needed more features it didn't do, but CCC Did, then i bought CCC.

I'm not saying I've ever had an issue with either, I'm simply saying i out grew the functionality of the first program and needed the second .

Thanks for that experience. I too am considering one or the other. I had been leaning to SD, but this gives me pause.

exegete77 said:

Thanks for that experience. I too am considering one or the other. I had been leaning to SD, but this gives me pause.

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Either program is a good choice, but it depends on what you want to do. For example SD gives you the ability to make a full clone and a bootable one and it also lets you select what to clone and doing smart back ups etc. It however won't clone the recovery partition, and it can't run in the background like CCC can e.g. via scheduled tasks where the app itself doesn't have to be open. I started off with SD for my regular go to app and I had no issues, then I needed more such as the features mentioned above so I added CCC to my collection. I believe it's a good idea to always have multiple solutions in the tool box. A free alternative for this with real computer experience would be CloneZilla. I used it to clone a linux boot drive in my server and it worked perfectly. Being linux based It would probably boot on a mac as well. The only downside would be could it handle the mac file system. Either way I found it to work good for the task I needed it for so it's also an option.

http://nicolasgallagher.com/mac-osx-bootable-backup-drive-with-rsync/

kapalua12 said:

Is one program for backup better than the other- Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper?

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I prefer CCC. Flexible, lasts for several osx versions before needing a paid upgrade. Flawless operation.

I endorse CCC. I have never seen a thread that I can remember with anyone saying CCC didn't do what was expected of it. SD seems to have the occasional detractor but the Recovery Partition cloning and reputation secures a vote for CCC from me.

simonsi said:

I endorse CCC.

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Definitely, CCC is the best app out there. I prefer that over anything else

I use Super duper both at home and on all the mac I manage at work. It has never let me down, I have used CCC when it was free but have no experience with the paid version.

I've used both in recent months, and have a preference for CCC, although SD is also a very capable cloning tool. Suggest you try both and take your pick.

CooperBox said:

I've used both in recent months, and have a preference for CCC, although SD is also a very capable cloning tool. Suggest you try both and take your pick.

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CCC is absolutely great. Never a problem, runs according to schedule, and is definitely (as I once had to find out, unfortunately) bootable. It has saved my bacon, as advertised. Like others I was a little miffed when it became a paid app, but I don't regret having purchased it. It's worth it.

i use super duper and time machine for my backups.i never had a problem with super duper in the year i have used it.to clone my hhd.

iceman42 said:

i use super duper and time machine for my backups.i never had a problem with super duper in the year i have used it.to clone my hhd.

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Dont you clone the recovery partition?

simonsi said:

Dont you clone the recovery partition?

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super duper dont clone the recovery partition

iceman42 said:

super duper dont clone the recovery partition

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Ummm - exactly! CCC does, which makes it my preference. PITA to add the Recovery partition seperately IMHO.

A follow up question: Will it matter with a Fusion drive rather than SSD or traditional HD?

Will what matter - the choice of CCC or SD? No, they work at the volume level and don't know or care what HW it is on (with the slight special case of CCC when it resizes partitions on the drive for the Recovery HD - but it still won't matter).

Take this in no way as an endorsement of Fusion drives though, they are the work of Satan ;-)