Apple introduced a new filesystem in macOS High Sierra, so naturally you may be wondering how Carbon Copy Cloner deals with this and how this new change might affect your backups. You might even be wondering, 'What's a filesystem?', so we'll start with that, and gradually move into more technical details.

• Carbon Copy Cloner Ccc
• Carbon Copy Cloner Ccc 4
• Ccc Copy Cloner
• Ccc Carbon Copy Cloner
• Ccc Carbon Copy Cloner Mac

Carbon Copy Cloner uses a different approach for backups; it literally clones the contents of your internal disk onto an external hard drive. (Or you may split your external disk into multiple partitions, and clone to one of those, so you can use the other partition for general purpose file storage). In the past, the Startup Disk Preference Pane would list all available startup volumes, including volumes cloned by CCC (whether CCC used ASR or its own file copier). Some Big Sur cloned volumes do not appear in the Startup Disk Preference Pane, despite being perfectly bootable. Ccc is a live, incremental, file system based backup system, able to create bootable os instances. It is not based on 40 years old technology like dd, nor rsync. Clonezilla is not even correctly spelled in english, completely unmaintained and, since it was mentioned, imagine this. I have 1TB ssd, with total used space of 100GB. I use a 256GB SSD for backup and I can always boot from it from a. First reviewed back in July 2002, Carbon Copy Cloner was, at the time, the only utility that could reliably duplicate a Mac OS X volume, making a bootable clone. Many people, including myself.

What's a filesystem?

The file system is perhaps the most important piece of software on your Mac. It’s also one of the most transparent, at least when it’s working correctly. Every user and every application uses the file system. The file system keeps track of and organizes all of the files on the hard drive, and also determines which users and applications have access to those files. The file system also keeps track of how many files you have and how much space they consume. Every time you look for a file, open a file, move a file, save a file or delete a file, it's the filesystem that is fulfilling that action.

Why is Apple introducing a new filesystem?

Apple’s legacy file system, HFS+, has worked well for almost 20 years, and Apple has made consistent improvements to it over that time. For example, Apple added support for extended attributes, file system compression, file system journaling, and full-disk encryption. All of these new features were added to keep pace with new operating system features and to make the file system more reliable. But that file system was created initially for Mac OS 8, and was designed for platter-based hard drives. Storage technology has changed a lot over the last 20 years, and modifying HFS+ to keep pace with those changes has proven increasingly difficult. To meet the challenges of new OSes and new storage technology, Apple introduced the Apple File System, or 'APFS' in High Sierra.

When I upgrade my Mac to High Sierra (or later), will my startup disk be converted to APFS?

When you upgrade to macOS High Sierra, systems with all flash storage configurations are converted automatically. Systems with hard disk drives (HDD) and Fusion drives won't be converted to APFS on macOS High Sierra. When you upgrade to Mojave, HDD and Fusion volumes are also converted to APFS. You can't opt-out of the transition to APFS.

If I first upgrade to High Sierra on an HDD, and then clone to an SSD, will the SSD be converted to APFS?

If you're running macOS High Sierra or Mojave, then neither the HDD nor the SSD will be automatically converted to APFS. You can choose, however, to erase the SSD as APFS prior to cloning to it. Both APFS and HFS are valid destination formats when using Carbon Copy Cloner 5 on High Sierra and Mojave. When making a backup of a macOS Catalina system volume, CCC will automatically convert the destination volume from HFS+ to APFS, but only after your explicit approval of the action.

Carbon Copy Cloner Ccc

If the OS upgrade converted my startup disk to APFS, what do I need to do to my backup disk? Do I have to erase it as APFS?

You don't need to do anything at all to your backup disk after upgrading to macOS High Sierra or Mojave (and again, on macOS Catalina, CCC will automatically convert the destination to APFS, so you still don't have to do anything to the destination volume). Having an HFS+ backup of an APFS-formatted High Sierra or Mojave startup volume is acceptable; that will function just fine for any future restores, even to an APFS-formatted volume. If your backup disk is an SSD, or if you were planning to erase the destination anyway, we do recommend that you erase it as APFS.

I'm running Mojave — can I erase my HDD destination as APFS? Are there any advantages to using APFS on the destination?

If you were planning to erase your destination volume anyway, we recommend that you format the volume as APFS. While enumeration performance of APFS on a rotational disk is still significantly worse than HFS+ on the same hardware, there are some other advantages to choosing APFS rather than HFS+. For example, an APFS destination can store snapshots from which you can do point-in-time restores. APFS volumes also support sparse files, and you're less likely to run into name comparison problems (e.g. when files on the source APFS volume have Unicode characters like 'é') when backing up to an APFS-formatted volume. You also cannot boot a T2 Mac from an HFS+ encrypted volume, so if you have a T2 Mac and encryption of the backup is required, you must choose APFS.

Can I use CCC to clone an APFS startup disk to another Mac?

The macOS installer applies a firmware upgrade to your Mac when you install the macOS upgrade. This firmware upgrade cannot be made part of the cloning process. Only the macOS Installer can upgrade a Macintosh to support APFS. If you attempt to clone an APFS volume to a Macintosh that has not yet received the firmware upgrade from the macOS Installer, that Macintosh will not be able to boot from the APFS volume. Once your Mac has received the firmware upgrade via the macOS Installer, your Mac can boot from a CCC bootable backup on an APFS volume. Note, however, that every major MacOS upgrade may require a new firmware upgrade to allow use of the newer operating system.

Note that this is also applicable to a Macintosh running in Target Disk Mode. If you upgrade one Mac to High Sierra (or later) via the Installer, you cannot boot a second Mac into Target Disk Mode, attach it to the first, then clone High Sierra (or later) to the Mac in Target Disk Mode. The required firmware upgrade cannot be applied to the Mac that is booted in Target Disk Mode, you must run the macOS Installer on that second Mac. Once the second Mac has received the firmware upgrade via the macOS Installer, you can clone the first Mac to the second Mac booted in Target Disk Mode.

Does CCC support encrypted APFS volumes?

Yes, CCC 5 can clone to and from encrypted APFS volumes (aka FileVault encryption). Note that CCC doesn't play any role in the encryption process – encryption is a function of the volume, not of the tool that's writing a file. If you enable FileVault on your startup disk, then the files on your startup disk will be encrypted. Those files are decrypted on-the-fly by the filesystem when they're opened by an application. Likewise, if you enable FileVault on the destination volume (e.g. via the Security Preference Pane while booted from the backup), then the files on the destination will be encrypted. CCC doesn't have to encrypt those files, they're encrypted on-the-fly by the filesystem as the bits are written to disk.

I heard that APFS has a 'cloning' feature. Is that the same as what CCC is doing?

No, the cloning functionality within APFS is completely unrelated to the cloning that CCC performs.

APFS cloning allows the user to instantly create copies of files on the same volume without consuming extra storage space. When cloning a file, the file system doesn’t create copies of the data, rather it creates a second reference to the file that can be modified independently of the first file. The two files will share storage on the disk for portions of the files that remain identical, but changes to either file will be written to different parts of the disk. APFS file cloning only works when you make copies of a file on the same volume (e.g. duplicate a file or folder in the Finder). CCC is typically copying files between volumes, so APFS cloning isn't applicable for that kind of task.

The important take-away is that APFS file cloning can save you space on your startup disk, but CCC cloning can save your data if your source disk fails. They serve completely different purposes; APFS file cloning is not at all related to making backups.

Why doesn't the disk usage on my backup disk match the disk usage on the source disk?

CCC's global exclusions as well as the SafetyNet feature have traditionally led to legitimate differences in disk usage in the past. The aforementioned APFS file cloning feature, however, adds a new dimension to this concern. While APFS file cloning saves space on your source volume, those space savings can't be consistently applied when copying your files to another volume (because Apple doesn't offer a way for us to determine that one file is a clone of another). Making matters worse, Finder does not accurately represent the true disk usage of your files. Finder doesn't take into consideration whether one file is a clone of another (again, because Apple doesn't provide a way to make that assessment), so it sums up the total size of each file and folder, presenting a total value that is possibly astronomically higher than the capacity of the disk.

If you convert your Mac's disk to APFS, understand that the disk usage on your source and destination may never add up, and therefore may not be a reliable measure for comparing the source and destination.

Additional Resources

We're here to help

If you get stuck or need some advice, you can get help right from within CCC. Choose 'Ask a question' from CCC's Help menu to pose a question to our Help Desk.

I was watching the news last week during the awful California fires, and they interviewed a guy who only had time to grab his family and run out of their home before it was engulfed in flames. He told the reporter that he didn’t have time to get his laptop which had his children’s baby photos on it … and they weren’t backed up.

I’m sure if you’ve been listening here and to other tech podcasts for any length of time, you have backups. I hope you also have off-site backups just in case of fire, flood, hurricane, tornado or even burglary. In the old days, it was hard to do backups, but nowadays you really have no excuse. Between Time Machine, cloning apps like SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner, Backblaze for offsite backups. Syncing services like Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and iCloud, which are not truly backups, do give you some level of protection from disaster.

I’ve been using SuperDuper! for my local clone backups for ages. I don’t remember how long ago I bought it it’s been so long! You can download SuperDuper! from shirt-pocket.com/… and use it for free to do a full clone backup. The developer, Dave Nanian, allows you to do that and entices you to buy the product by offering extra features.

With the licensed version you can schedule your backups, which I think is essential to make sure they actually happen. You can also do incremental backups, so you don’t have to wait for the entire disk to be cloned every time when only a few things have changed. You can exclude items as well. Maybe you don’t want to back up Dropbox because it’s already in the cloud; you could exclude it with your licensed version of SuperDuper!.

Carbon Copy Cloner Ccc 4

As Bart would say, “SuperDuper! does what it says on the tin”, but it’s not an elegant, pretty application. It’s more what I would call utilitarian. The website is worse than utilitarian, it’s ancient. The menu bar looks like the old aqua interface from 2000. That’s 19 years ago folks. The text on the menubar is also is fuzzy and hard to read.

Not to pour gasoline on the fire, but the second tab on the shirt-pocket website is for a product called netTunes, and there’s a banner saying that it’s not yet Leopard compatible. Seriously. While the website was pretty accessible on VoiceOver, there were a few crucially unlabeled buttons in the app, like the one you need to press to start the clone.

Catalina Time

When it came time to upgrade to macOS Catalina, I repurposed the mind map I created for my clean installs to keep track of which apps were ready to go. I track apps in three categories: mission-critical, important, and less important. With the dumpster fire that has been Apple’s recent OS releases, I wasn’t in any hurry to migrate my production Mac anyway so I took my time.

I had one irritant in not going to macOS Catalina right away and that was the Reminders app. While Apple gave a HUGE warning on iOS that if you allowed Reminders to upgrade to their brand new database you would lose your Reminders on all of your other non-upgraded devices, I didn’t heed the warning and upgraded. Apple then did exactly what they said would happen, and erased all of my Reminders on my Mojave Mac. I use Reminders quite a bit and it was annoying as heck that I wasn’t getting reminded of things and couldn’t create new reminders on my Mac.

Finally, I got to the point where all of my mission-critical apps and most of my important apps were painted green in iThoughts, designating them as Catalina ready. Except for one, SuperDuper!. When I researched the app on Shirt-Pocket, I learned that the app was still in beta 4 for macOS Catalina. I truly enjoy running beta software when it’s not mission-critical. The last thing I would beta test would be my backup software!

Carbon Copy Cloner

I tend to be loyal to the products and services I use, which is a bit of a curse. I can’t drop one brand and jump to another easily and it’s an instinct I have to actively fight, but it was time to look elsewhere for my clone backups. I decided to check out SuperDuper!’s main competitor, Carbon Copy Cloner from bombich.com/…. I’ve long heard great things about Carbon Copy Cloner and its founder, Mike Bombich.

The first thing I did was check for compatibility with macOS Catalina and I was delighted to learn that Carbon Copy Cloner version was working way back in August even in the betas of macOS Catalina. That’s kind of a miracle that it didn’t break during the anarchy that has been the Catalina development cycle!

Carbon Copy Cloner is $40, compared to the $28 of SuperDuper!, but having a current, modern app is well worth the difference in price to me. This might be a great example of “You get what you pay for.” When you think about what you’re protecting with a clone backups solution, does $40 sound like very much money? Your child’s first dance recital video? Your honeymoon photos? Your tax records? Yeah, I’d say $40 is a steal.

You don’t have to shell out any money to find out if Carbon Copy Cloner will work for you because they recommend that you download it and use it for 30 days first. I used it for about 24 hours and I was sold.

The interface of Carbon Copy Cloner is clean and modern with just a few buttons across the top, a left sidebar and a center pane that’s called the Task Plan. Carbon Copy Cloner allows you to save different clone operations as separate tasks. I can see maybe you want to make a copy of just your tax folder onto a thumb drive that you keep in a safe, but you have another task that’s your full clone backup that you take to your mom’s house every week.

In the left sidebar, you create these tasks and name them. The bottom left of the pane shows the volumes Carbon Copy Cloner has recognized from which you choose to copy from and to for your backups. Then in the center Task Plan area, you’ll see three big areas inviting you to select to choose a source, a destination and set a schedule.

The graphics are gorgeous (and more importantly intuitive) as you set these options. When selecting a destination for example, you’ll see nice icons for your internal and external volumes, but you can also choose a folder, a new disk image, an existing disk image or a remote Macintosh.

I’ve only ever backed up to a local drive before but the idea of backing up from one Mac to another is kind of intriguing. I’ve got a perfectly good Mac mini sitting across the hall from me as my PLEX server, connected via Ethernet, I could actually use some of its extra disk space to back up my files.

When I chose the remote Mac option, I was asked to authenticate. Carbon Copy Cloner then informed me that for future connections to this remote Mac it will use Public Key Authentication (PKA) and asked my permission to install my public key over on the remote Mac. Very secure, very modern and awesome. I chose a folder on my Mac, pointed to a folder on the remote Mac mini as a backup destination and boom, I had a backup from one Mac to another.

Carbon Copy Cloner has an option to send mail when a backup fails and I’d really like to use this option but it doesn’t work for me. I suspect this is not Carbon Copy Cloner’s fault. When Bart helped me set up what’s called a cron job in linux-land to download a backup from my website every day to one of my Macs, we tried to have it send mail and it wouldn’t work either. Bart says it’s my ISP blocking it and I never got around to figuring out if there was a way to fix that.

Ccc Copy Cloner

Ok, that was cool but what about the big clone job? I keep my backup drive plugged in (a 2TB Samsung T5 only $300 on Amazon right now and of course available in smaller sizes. ). I chose the T5 as my clone backup destination and my internal drive with “copy all files” selected in the pulldown. In the third pane, I chose a schedule to run at 11 am every day.

Carbon Copy Cloner includes an interesting feature called SafetyNet. They explain that when people buy giant drives for their backups, they often can’t resist the temptation to use some of that storage space for other things. If you’ve got a 512GB internal drive and a 3TB spinning backup drive, could you resist that temptation? With SafetyNet turned on, those items that aren’t part of the source destination can be preserved.

I’m just now learning about snapshots so I don’t entirely understand another function of SafetyNet. According to the documentation, if you back up to an APFS-formatted destination volume, Carbon Copy Cloner creates a SafetyNet Snapshot on the destination. I suspect this is why my clone is taking up 1.84GB, while my source disk is only 1.01TB. I’ll be poking around in here via the terminal to learn more but for now I’ll assume that’s why.

Carbon Copy Cloner Adopted SuperDuper! Backup

In the old days of backups, programs saved your data in arcane data structures inoperable by anything but themselves. You had little opportunity to verify your backups and you could never migrate a backup to a new tool. One of the great joys of modern-day clone backups is that they look just like the source data. With a clone, you should see a duplicate of your entire file structure.

When I ran Carbon Copy Cloner for the first time, I didn’t bother to reformat my backup drive, figuring Carbon Copy Cloner would give me a warning that it was about to erase my drive before beginning, but I didn’t get that warning. I thought that was kind of odd, but it went to town running a backup and in short order it claimed to be finished.

Ccc Carbon Copy Cloner

And that’s when I realized that it was able to simply pick up where SuperDuper! had left off. It recognized that the destination drive had most of what I had on my source drive and simply brought it up to date. At least I think that’s what it did! There’s a very nicely formatted Task History list that shows the task name, the source, the destination, the start time and elapsed time. It also shows how much data was copied and the status, either a green circle with a check mark or a red circle with an X.

I can see that my first backup with Carbon Copy Cloner took 29 minutes and copied 176GB, but my daily 11am backups are only averaging around 8 minutes and moving around 15GB. I’m not 100% certain why that first backup is big but not huge. I thought it might have something to do with this snapshot capability in Carbon Copy Cloner, but I checked my destination volume and it shows snapshot creation is off. I looked to see if it had created a SafetyNet folder because it thought some of this data was from some other source, but there’s nothing there. Curious.

With SuperDuper!, my clones never took less than a half hour on their daily schedule, even though it was only incremental backups and it was going between wicked-fast SSDs. Seeing that Carbon Copy Cloner does the backups in about 8 minutes every morning, I might let it do this more often. Maybe I’ll go crazy and back up twice a day!

Speaking of incremental backups, on SuperDuper! there was a specific pulldown to select to do incremental vs. a full backup each time. I hunted everywhere in Carbon Copy Cloner for how to make an incremental backup before I realized that it always uses incremental. I guess if you want a full backup, you’d have to erase the destination first. I might do that just to figure out why the backup is taking up so much space.

Before I forget, remember to test your clone backup when nothing is going wrong to make sure it looks just like your internal disk. If you’re running a T2 Mac, also don’t forget to go into the Startup Security Utility and check the box to allow booting from external media.

It’s turned off by default so you won’t be able to boot from your clone if you don’t change that first. Better now than when you’re in the middle of a critical task and your Mac drive goes belly up and you need to keep working. If you want to stick with Apple’s choice on this that’s fine, but make sure you understand the repercussions if you do!

Accessibility

For those of you who are VoiceOver users, I poked around a bit with VoiceOver on and I wasn’t able to find a menu or button that was unlabeled or didn’t function and I didn’t find any. Keep in mind I’m a novice VoiceOver user so that’s not a full seal of approval but usually, I stumble across problems pretty quickly if the developer hasn’t done their job properly.

DATA Volumes on macOS Catalina

In my article about the MacTech conference, I explained that with macOS Catalina we now have two volumes on our boot drives. You can see them in Disk Utility as your hard drive name followed by ” – Data” which is where your data lives, and a second one without the suffix which is your operating system. This design gives us further protection from malware.

I remind you about this because in Carbon Copy Cloner you can inspect your volumes as well. For my internal SSD, playfully named Hippo) I have Hippo – Data, and plain old Hippo. Likewise, I can see two volumes for my backup drive. The first of these in each pair is kind of terrifying at first. I inspected my backup drive and it said “Operating System: macOS not installed”. Wait, what? You’re supposed to be a bootable clone darn it! Then I calmed down and looked at the backup disk volume without ” – Data” after it and it said “Operating System: macOS Catalina (10.5.1)”. Whew.

I wanted to walk you through that so you don’t think Carbon Copy Cloner is doing something crazy here, it’s Apple who has made this new structure for us. By the way, it’s also in this inspector area that you can turn on and off CCC Snapshots. As I said, I need to learn more about snapshots before I make any recommendations here.

This week, Time Machine told Steve that his internal drive was nearly full even though Get Info said it should be only half full. Luckily I’m an avid listener of the Mac Geek Gab, and I’d learned that there was this whole concept of Time Machine snapshots and how sometimes they go rogue and fill up your internal drive. I did some searching and learned about thinning said snapshots and we recovered his lost space. I don’t understand what caused them to turn against Steve so I’m going to stay away from them in Carbon Copy Cloner until I learn more.

Licensing

Ccc Carbon Copy Cloner Mac

The last thing I wanted to mention about Carbon Copy Cloner is the licensing. Like I said $40 to preserve what’s important to me is chump change, but I was wondering if I’d have to buy a separate license for Steve.

Luckily, the answer is no. In a support article on bombich.com/… it says, “The CCC License allows you to install and use Carbon Copy Cloner on any computer that you own or control for personal, noncommercial use.” He’s got other licensing for commercial or institutional use, including academic purchasing options.

Bottom Line

The bottom line is that I’m delighted that I’ve moved off of the ancient SuperDuper! and onto the more modern Carbon Copy Cloner. I probably should have done this ages ago and half of you are thinking, “What took you so long?” But hey, I got there in the end. If you’re not doing local clone backups and you need that little push to get started, I can really endorse Carbon Copy Cloner. There’s a free 30-day trial, what do you have to lose?