carbon copy cloner question

You have the option of backing up only the changes with CCC, similar to Time Machine but without the "backup history."

 

"my question is with carbon cloner, does it work the same as time machine, for backups? when i plug in my external will it find all the changes? and does it work as fast as a time machine backup or does carbon cloner always do a full backup overtop of the previous one?"

CCC is one of the best pieces of software currently available for the Mac. It's head and shoulders above Time Machine for most purposes.

CCC will create a "bootable cloned backup" of your internal drive. That is to say (and UNLIKE TM) the clone will be an "exact copy" of the contents of your "main" drive, AND, it will be bootable as well. If for some reason your main drive is having problems, you can boot from the CCC clone and it will boot up and "look like" your main drive did (as of the last time you backed it up).

You CANNOT boot from a TM backup. This can leave many users "up the creek" in a moment of extreme need.

The way it works is this:
1. You do a "full clone" of your internal (the first time) using CCC.
2. As time passes, you update the clone with "incremental backups". What happens is CCC will scan your main drive, note what has changed, and add changed files (and REMOVE deleted files) to make the backup/clone identical with the original.

Thus, the backup always is a clone of the original, as it existed at the time of the last incremental backup.

HOWEVER -- a very interesting and important addition to CCC is that it can now "archive" older files that you have deleted from your main drive. This means that during the incremental backup process, instead of simply deleting files that have been changed/removed from your main drive, it will move them to a special area of your backup drive that is reserved for archived material. The end result is that you still have a "clone" of your internal, but you also have an archive of older (deleted from your main drive) files. As such, CCC has now added some of the advantages of TM, in that you can "go back" a ways to sift through older stuff if you need to. I don't use this feature personally, but it's there if you want it.

Yet, with all this, CCC is very simple to set up and use.

I suggest that you give it a try!

 

I will throw this out there, simply because it got me..

CC doesn't clone the recovery partition in Lion. No big deal as you can still boot to Option +R but if the system doesn't see the recovery partition you can't administer iCloud for Find My Mac nor Filevault.

 

One other note to add to this informative post is that you can still set up your CCC backup to NOT archive older files. you do this via the "Customize these settings" button in the main dialog window.

 

It shouldn't, but if it does, you can just go into Disk Utility, delete the extra empty partition and resize the first cloned partition. It won't affect data or anything else, just resize it .

 

I'm currently using TM as my backup and looking at using CCC also.

Question:

If I get a new mac, can I copy specific files from an existing CCC backup to the new computer or is CCC just a bootable backup drive?

For example: On the new computer, can I simply plug in the HD with the CCC backup on it and copy specific files (music, pictures, videos etc...) to folders on the new mac?

 

Yes, you can.
You can even specify what CCC clones/copies.

I use CCC to clone my system drives and also the drives I need for backup purposes.

 

The ccc clone is just another hard drive with an exact copy of your data. You can happily connect it to your computer and copy files using finder off it. You don't need to use CCC to copy your data back.

 

CCC is such a well-designed app that I'm surprised Apple hasn't offered to buy it, since it is far FAR superior to Time Machine for backing up.

I sense that in "moments of extreme need", many more users have problems with their TM backups than do those who have used CCC to create backups/clones....

 

Sounds like I'll be purchasing another external HD for use with CCC . . . sounds like a good backup program. I'll continue to use TM for daily connected backups and use CCC as an additional backup.

Questions:

1. I have a 2TB iMac which I'll be using with CCC. Currently I have about 500GB being used (of the 2TB). Can I use CCC with a 1TB HD or do I have to have a 2TB HD to match my iMac?

2. Do you guys (CCC users) leave the CCC external HD constantly plugged in to your iMac/computers or just connect it for incremental backups (daily, weekly, monthly etc . . .)

Thanks

 

No, unless you have more than 1 TB of data you want to backup. Btw, it is recommended to have at least 10 % of the HDD's capacity free (100 GB out of 1 TB).

No need, but I do, as I have scheduled CCC to do a daily backup of my 60 GB SSD onto a 120 GB partition on one of the HDDs connected to my iMac.
And as the SSD is quite small, I use the rest of the external HDDs for storage and data access.

 

Thank you: "iisforiphone", "simsaladimbamba" and "theSeb" for your responses.

I will definitely start CCC as a secondary backup (in addition to TM).

Last question . . for now :

After I create a CCC backup onto an external HD, can any mac read the files (documents, pictures, music files etc...) from this HD (via Finder), or does that mac need CCC software installed to view the files?

 

Any Mac can read from it, CCC is not required. It is just another HDD, nothing special.

 

Awesome. Thanks!

You think TM & CCC is a good backup strategy? I'm mostly worried about losing all of my documents, photos and music (huge music library). I'm not all that worried about software programs.

Currently, all I'm using is TM

 

TM is okay, I just don't use it, as I don't like it and had more problems than it is worth it, though these problems were when TM was introduced and still in its infancy.

For my text based documents, I use Dropbox, as it is an online backup, thus accessible everywhere with internet access.
For my other data I just employ CCC, my digital photos are backed up twice (thus resulting in three copies of them) and my music is backed up once.

 

When you say "backed up twice", do you mean that you have 2 separate external HD's with a CCC backup on them?