Carbon Copy Cloner looks more complicated than SuperDuper! But a little extra complexity comes greater functionality. Everything that SuperDuper! Does, so can Carbon Copy Cloner. It's a very good product, as is Carbon Copy Cloner (never used it, but have read numerous positive reviews, comments, etc. Remember folks, SuperDuper! Does not backup the (hidden) Recovery partition, whereas Carbon Copy Cloner can/does. Not an issue for me, but maybe it is for others.
Note: This will erase all data on the specified disk
Open a Finder window and navigate to Applications > Utilities and double click on Disk Utility.
The remaining steps vary considerably depending on the operating system you are running. Choose About This Mac from the Apple menu to determine your current OS, then make a selection below.
Watch a video of this tutorial on YouTube
Watch a longer, in-depth tutorial about using Disk Utility
Disk Utility offers a very simplified view of your devices by default. Unfortunately, this hides the devices that you need to select to modify the partitioning of your backup disk. Before doing anything else in Disk Utility, choose Show All Devices from the View menu, or from the View popup button in Disk Utility's toolbar.
Click to select the disk that you would like to use as the destination for your CCC task. This disk should not be the same as your startup disk.
The name of a new disk will often include the manufacturer’s name (e.g. WD My Book 111D Media..). A startup disk will often include the manufacturer's serial number in the title (e.g. TOSHIBA MK50..). Please pay particular attention to selecting the disk, not one of the volumes on the disk. You must select the whole disk to correctly initialize the device. If your disk is a Fusion device, you may erase the 'container' within it instead.
Disk Utility occasionally has problems with unmounting a volume while attempting to erase it (e.g. because Spotlight prevents the unmount request). Click the Eject button next to any volumes on the disk to preemptively unmount them before erasing the disk.
Click on the Erase button in Disk Utility's toolbar, then configure the name, format, and partitioning scheme of your disk. You can set the name to whatever you like, but set the Scheme to GUID Partition Map. If you do not see the Scheme option, go back two steps and select the whole disk device, not one of the volumes on the disk.
If your destination device is an HDD with a rotational speed of 5400RPM (or slower): (e.g. 'Slim' backup devices, 2.5' disks) APFS is not designed for these devices, macOS boot performance may be poor. You can format these devices as APFS and try to make a bootable backup, but if the performance of the device is too slow to be practical, then we recommend you choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for the format. If you are making a backup of a Big Sur or Catalina startup disk, you should create a from Disk Utility's Edit menu. If you chose another format, select the backup volume, then click the 'Partition' button in Disk Utility's toolbar.
Click to select the disk that you would like to use as the destination for your CCC task. This disk should not be the same as your startup disk.
The name of a new disk will often include the manufacturer’s name (e.g. WD My Book 111D Media..). A startup disk will often include the manufacturer's serial number in the title (e.g. TOSHIBA MK50..).
Click on the Erase button in Disk Utility's toolbar, then configure the name, format, and partitioning scheme of your disk. You can set the name to whatever you like, but set the Format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and set the Scheme to GUID Partition Map, then click the Erase button.
Click Don’t Use. You may use the same backup disk for both Time Machine and CCC backups, but if you do so, you must use a dedicated partition for the Time Machine backup. Otherwise Time Machine will consume all available space on the backup volume and make it impossible for CCC to use the backup volume.
Click to select the disk that you would like to use as the destination for your CCC task. This disk should not be the same as your startup disk.
The name of a new disk will often include the storage capacity and manufacturer’s name (e.g. Logitech bluetooth devices driver. 500.07 GB WD My Passp..). A startup disk will often include the manufacturer's serial number in the title (e.g. 320.07 GB TOSHIBA MK3255GSXF Media).
Click on the Partition tab.
Choose 1 Partition from the Partition Layout popup menu (or more if desired).
Click on Options.
Choose GUID Partition Table, then click the OK.
Select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) from the Partition Format popup menu.
Click Apply.
Ensure that you have selected the correct disk. This step will delete all data from the selected disk. Click Partition.
Now skip ahead to the remainder of the instructions that are not OS-specific.
Backup and Cloning software has a lot to contend with in the upcoming Catalina OS. What about the HFS+ file system? How does it deal with the APFS Snapshot system? Carbon Copy Cloner by Mike Bombich is one of the best cloning and backup Apps in the Mac universe. It has been around for a long time, is super supported and is a very versatile cloning and backup App. With all the changes in the upcoming Mac OS Catalina, CCC has had to make changes too as will all backup cloning software. I wanted to list a few of the changes in CCC that jumped out at me.
As previously mentioned there are significant changes in the Catalina OS. I am sure I will upgrade to it on my main workflow machine, but I recommend proceeding with caution, especially if you have some older, legacy Apps you need to keep using. Having said this, for most people CCC will just work as normal. They won’t have to change their backups because CCC is handling things under the hood:
CCC will make bootable backups of macOS Catalina startup volumes. For most people, that’s all you need to know, and you don’t have to make any changes to your current tasks to accommodate the upgrade. The logistics of booting macOS are a bit more complicated in macOS Catalina, but we’ve risen to the challenge, CCC supports it 100%, and nearly all of these complications are dealt with automatically.
CCC will take care of most issues automatically for most people. However, there are some things that affect me and may affect you:
Apple has been moving away from the old HFS+ file format for quite some time. All things are moving toward APFS, that is just the future of Mac computing. From the CCC website:
Allow me to be the first to say it: stick a fork in it, HFS is done. HFS simply won’t work for making a backup of a Catalina system volume, so in the near future, we’re going to drop support for backing up macOS (Catalina and later) to HFS+ formatted volumes. We plan to make this as easy as possible for you, though, so don’t go out of your way to get ready for this. My goal is to make this transition as simple as possible for you and your backups.
This is important to me because a couple of my backups go to HFS+ drives. The fix for this looks pretty seamless though:
macOS Catalina requires APFS, it cannot be backed up to a volume formatted with Apple’s legacy HFS+ format. When cloning a macOS Catalina system volume, CCC will inform you of this requirement and request your permission to allow conversion of an HFS+ formatted destination to APFS. When you proceed with the task, CCC will automatically convert the destination to APFS (when possible). When you upgrade to macOS Catalina, any existing backup tasks that reference your startup disk and a non-APFS destination volume will be disabled and flagged for review. If any scheduled tasks are disabled in this manner, CCC will be opened automatically on startup and these concerns will be raised to your attention.
I definitely plan to report back on this process. Hopefully, it will just be a seamless conversion of the backup drive to APFS with no issues. If anyone can do this, Mike Bombich and CCC can.
As previously mentioned, Catalina has a Read-Only System. Therefore, it makes a System and a Data Volume. The System Volume stays locked and you can access and change the Data Volume. CCC will handle this in its backup scheme:
CCC will automatically create System and Data volumes on the destination as required to support APFS volume groups.
When selecting an APFS volume group member as a source (i.e. your current startup disk), CCC will automatically copy the contents of both the System and Data volumes to the corresponding System and Data volumes on the destination. No special configuration is required for this, you will simply choose a single source and destination as you have in the past.
CCC has always been a smart backup cloning App and it is going to remain that way.
The new APFS system is based on something called “Snapshots”. You can read more on that here. CCC will handle Snapshots like this:
CCC offers great flexibility for restoring from System and Data volume snapshots. For example, you can restore from a newer Data volume snapshot and an older System volume snapshot, allowing you to downgrade the System without losing newer data. However, care should be taken when restoring System and Data volume snapshots that are associated with different OS versions, we don’t yet know the implications of mixing these.
Download efk provider usb devices driver. This may sound a bit confusing, but it really allows a great deal of versatility when Restoring items from a backup clone to your main Mac.
I reiterate, any backup or cloning software will have to deal with these issues; HFS+, APFS Snapshots, Restoring Files and many others in the new Catalina way of doing things. Curitel modems driver download for windows. I know CCC will be up to the task and I am sure many other backup Apps will be.
Before upgrading to Catalina, I highly recommend checking into your backup software to determine where they are on providing reliable backups and clones. No sense in installing a new OS if you cannot back it up.