CCC has been officially qualified (their words) since version 4.1.10 released on September 16, 2016.
I have happily used it with Sierra since.
So the "New version of Carbon Copy Cloner fully Sierra compatible" is kind of old news.
Or sponsored article?
Why isn't it worth $40? the old price doesn't matter. why isn't the value received from the app today worth 40 bucks?
Of course the old price matters...how can something go from $0 to $40? It would be like Apple charging for macOS updates again....going from $0 to $40. People would be bitching up a storm and you know it! To me it still doesn't do anything that Time Machine can't, except boot from a backup which I don't care about.
An independent developer going from free to $40 is anything but weird. Nothing like Apple charging for OS updates.
And CCC does TONS of things TM doesn't do! : ) Aside from the wealth of customization and scheduling it gives useful and thorough info when things are not as expected. TM gives...no info. It might churn for 24 hours and then give no info what's wrong. When TM works, which is most of the time for most people, it's great. But it truly is the definition of one-trick-pony, useful as that trick is. The few customizations you can make to it are oddly interfaced and limited. This is why no one is "bitching up a storm" about CCC being $40! : ) It's very much like saying "Why should I buy XYZ drive utility when I have Apple's Disk Utility?
Go to the Bombich site and read through it, skipping the "Simple Mode", which is sort of comparable to TM.
CCC has been officially qualified (their words) since version 4.1.10 released on September 16, 2016.
I have happily used it with Sierra since.
So the "New version of Carbon Copy Cloner fully Sierra compatible" is kind of old news.
Or sponsored article?
Not a sponsored article.
In the extraordinarily rare instance that we do them, they're clearly labeled as such.
I had looked at Carbon Copy Cloner in the past and decided to go with SuperDuper ($27.95) instead. For my needs I actually prefer the interface and found it to be very fast. I recently purchased a new 13" MacBook Pro w/o Touchbar running macOS Sierra of course. SuperDuper is Sierra compatible and obviously does bootable system images, scheduled incremental backups, Smart Backups and allows for Sandboxing.
My backup strategy is very simple. I create a new, full SuperDuper image before any major software update and store it on my external USB-C SSD drive. This process takes about 9 minutes total. The image for my complete system is about 87GB which includes data. Any new or changed data files that are added between those images are stored locally and to both iCloud and OneDrive. Any photo images that I import through Lightroom to my local (SSD) drive are also automatically set to copy to the external SSD drive to a separate filesystem (from the system image) during import. Very quick and my data is located in multiple locations. Works great with a laptop scenario.
Carbon Copy Cloner definitely has many more options - that I personally have no use for which is the reason that I chose SuperDuper. For me it's as simple as: 1) click the app to open, 2) Click the Backup button (it remembers that last backup setup i.e. Origin and Destination drives), 3) wait 9 or so minutes, 4) Close the app. Now I have a complete, bootable image of my entire system and data. Restores are identical except of course you would boot off the external image, run SuperDuper, select restore and then reboot your system locally. All done.
The app is completely cost-free to use to make images and perform restores. I did pay the $27.95 fee to be able to use the Smart Backups and Sandbox options if I choose to in the future but have yet to find a need for it. I would surely consider CCC for a production environment or someone that has a complex home setup. I find that both products are well worth their fees and that both are very stable, reliable products. Just another option to consider...you can't go wrong either way.
I use CCC, SuperDuper, Chronosync & Time Machine every day - they are all worth their purchase price.
CCC for nightly server backups (approx 150 TB) SuperDuper for boot drive replication (mostly for swapping HDD to SSD) Chronosync for offsites (the chronocync agent is great) Time Machine for backup during the work day (restoring a full disk from TM is tedious at best)
Give yourself this gift of backup prowess this year. It's worth every penny.
Yes, yes it is. I too paid for CCC back when it was "free" because it was worth it. CCC has always been the class of its field, and remains it.
CCC handles our nightly server backups, plus it's my indispensable tool for duplicating drives, and in particular for installing the bootable Recovery partition on a new drive.
Maybe I'm just cheap, but I don't think this program is worth $40. It used to be free and then all of a sudden its magically worth $40! I can basically use Time Machine to do the same thing for free.
Wrong.
Time Machine, which I also use for my personal backup, is an excellent resource. But it's not a competitor for CCC. One obvious example: Time Machine can't create bootable backups.
No but you can restore to a hard drive and boot from it. Its still not worth $40...
Why isn't it worth $40? the old price doesn't matter. why isn't the value received from the app today worth 40 bucks?
Of course the old price matters...how can something go from $0 to $40? It would be like Apple charging for macOS updates again....going from $0 to $40. People would be bitching up a storm and you know it! To me it still doesn't do anything that Time Machine can't, except boot from a backup which I don't care about.
well, no, it really doesn't matter. since we live in the present the decision before you is whether this software in this moment is worth 40 dollars, or if it is not. those are your binary choices to act on.
when the real estate market (or any market) dropped it didn't matter one bit what a house was worth before, only what it's worth *now*. twenty years ago the houses in my neighborhood were a fraction of what they are today, but if i offered an older price to a seller because that's what it used to be, they'd laugh me out of the room.
anyway as as someone else pointed out it was donationware and not free.
I've been using CCC ever since Time Machine screwed me over and corrupted all of my backup data after an update to Mavericks. My CCC backs up to an 18TB (5 drive) Drobo with 2 disc redundancy.
I've been using CCC on all of my Macs - likely from the day it was first released. It's one of the finest, and most reliable apps I own! I also use Time Machine, and have separate external drives for both utilities. As good as Time Machine is, CCC is better! BUT, the most critically important asset of this utility is Mike Bombich - the creator of CCC. In every instance over the years when I've needed information or help with CCC, my emails are answered in RECORD TIME - by Mike himself. I know of no other company that offers the level of support that Bombich Software does! NOT ONE!
P.S. I've been using Macs for over 35 years. I've been using computers since 1963 (Mainframes in college), so I know, likely more than many, how critical it is to back up your work on a daily basis.
Maybe I'm just cheap, but I don't think this program is worth $40. It used to be free and then all of a sudden its magically worth $40! I can basically use Time Machine to do the same thing for free.
It was not free, it was donationware. People not getting this difference are the most likely cause of the new price :-)
I would not like to live without it. I had several cases where our expensive Retrospect copies could not restore our project Mac servers, but CCC did it correctly and in a third of the time. If you run any productive Mac servers without CCC and Drive Genius in your toolbox, you are already on the Darwin-award list, IMHO. TM is great for restoring single lost or messed up files, for a full restore it is just too slow in a productive setting, even if it does work (which isn't always the case, I know several people who could not restore Fusion Drives using TM and effectively lost data).
$40.! That's less than a meal for 2 at a mid-range restaurant. For a program of this quality, $40. is more of a bargain than you will ever know if you don't give it a shot!
Give yourself this gift of backup prowess this year. It's worth every penny.
Yes, yes it is. I too paid for CCC back when it was "free" because it was worth it. CCC has always been the class of its field, and remains it.
CCC handles our nightly server backups, plus it's my indispensable tool for duplicating drives, and in particular for installing the bootable Recovery partition on a new drive.
Maybe I'm just cheap, but I don't think this program is worth $40. It used to be free and then all of a sudden its magically worth $40! I can basically use Time Machine to do the same thing for free.
Wrong.
Time Machine, which I also use for my personal backup, is an excellent resource. But it's not a competitor for CCC. One obvious example: Time Machine can't create bootable backups.
No but you can restore to a hard drive and boot from it. Its still not worth $40...
Does CCC just keep a mirrored copy of my hard drive? So, if I delete a file, would it delete in on my CCC backed drive as well? Or does it have a facility to restore from a point in time like Time Machine?
My biggest issue with Time Machine is that it drops files when it runs out of space. Granted, it is the oldest files, but not something I want a backup system to do, without my explicit action.
Maybe this basic difference between CCC and Time Machine is why you consider the programs complimentary. If so, it makes sense. Anyway Mike, I'm looking forward to your comparison between the 2 products.
CCC is an excellent program. For a long time it was free for educational users and the implication was it would remain that way. It didn't and Time Machine along with the restore partition provided an alternative to CCC.
I use both CCC and SuperDuper! and have successfully relied on both for a decade. I currently clone to a 2012 Mac Mini via FW 800...reliability and bootable clones are very cool and, IMHO, worth the money to support useful Mac utilities.
Does CCC just keep a mirrored copy of my hard drive? So, if I delete a file, would it delete in on my CCC backed drive as well? Or does it have a facility to restore from a point in time like Time Machine?
My biggest issue with Time Machine is that it drops files when it runs out of space. Granted, it is the oldest files, but not something I want a backup system to do, without my explicit action.
Maybe this basic difference between CCC and Time Machine is why you consider the programs complimentary. If so, it makes sense. Anyway Mike, I'm looking forward to your comparison between the 2 products.
CCC is mostly a wrapper around the unix tool rsync, which is bundled with OS X (type man rsync into terminal and hit space bar to read through the commands). CCC bundles a copy of rsync with the app:
You could replicate everything CCC does with the built-in OS X tools, it just makes it user-friendly. This software is intended for mirroring. CCC (and rsync) has the ability to keep old files but you can't restore to that point, you can only copy things out of that folder manually so e.g rolling back an OS wouldn't be a trivial task, there's a note here on restoring a previous OS version:
In order to do this, you'd need to keep a separate clone for each OS snapshot but the good thing with CCC is being able to clone portions of the drive so you can clone just the system separate from the files into say a disk image.
I reckon Apple's upcoming filesystem (APFS, 2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_System ) will make cloning much easier. It has the ability to instantly create snapshots of an OS and only writes the changes. This can easily allow bootable snapshots in Time Machine. You'd start with a full system. You maybe get a developer beta of the OS so you create a clone, which happens nearly instantly as it just links at the filesystem level to the original. The beta then writes into the clone but doesn't change the original. You can then test the system out fully and all writes go into the clone. To roll back, you can easily go back to the snapshot, which just ignores the writes in the new clone. This will be much easier for developers to work on OS betas but apps like CCC will likely still offer more control.
CCC is good for being able to exclude files/folders in backup profiles so you can have different profiles for different backups. Virtual machine images for example that might change very little but are large can be excluded from being cloned each time.
I'd like to see operating systems be a bit easier to install and manage. They could be authored as disk images, dropped onto a drive and it becomes a bootable system. As long as the machine can mount the image then it can boot from that. Then there would be a lot less headaches around system upgrades and rollbacks. You'd just copy a single file into place and that's the system ready to use. Anything writable goes outside that image. This goes for Mac, Linux and Windows. They can all be authored as disk images either in standard formats or in a format that can be mounted with a small software package at boot. If there can be a dynamic filesystem that accommodates easily adjustable partitions, setting up multiple systems would be basic. You could copy images for OS X, Windows and Linux onto a drive, create 3 filesystem containers, one for each with their own filesystem and they can expand/contract as needed and it would be nice if they could be simultaneously booted natively so no more need for virtual machines.
How does CCC compare to the cheaper SuperDuper? Does it work better/faster, do more, etc.?
And does SuperDuper work with Sierra?
I agree with the takes above, having used both. Also, CCC is made by a small, but nimble company, whereas SuperDuper is (to my knowledge) at this point pretty much a one man production for a number of years, almost a labor of love... ...and not to take anything away from him or the venerable product (which still works very well), it's probably more difficult to keep doing things like OS release-specific updates.
Also for those who compared the $40 price to Apple's giving away OS updates these days, MacOS is not how Apple makes its money, and CCC is how Bombich makes theirs, for which they deserve to be paid a price that makes it worth their continuing to keep the product supported, fully functioning and up to date.
Maybe I'm just cheap, but I don't think this program is worth $40. It used to be free and then all of a sudden its magically worth $40! I can basically use Time Machine to do the same thing for free.
Easily worth $40. Updates for each macOS (for pretty much whatever changes they throw at Bombich), recovery partition tool, bootable updates, and used for over 10 years now, most of which was free...
So much time saving and restructuring of my systems has been made so beautifully because of this software it's unbelievable. Just got thru doing my 6 month "Grandfather" updates (today), and nightly "fathers".
This easily makes macOS so much better than Windows, it's what "made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs" haha no but seriously this is the Weapon that destroys the Mac vs Windows debate (and Linux too). I have probably done like 20 rollbacks after disaster (even bad app installs). Which have made me be able to have machines that have had the same system/stuff installed since Tiger! and just updated and carried over all the way to macOS Sierra!
How you ask? I have one system that started on a Mac Pro (2006) Tiger 10.4.3 evolved all the way up to Snow Leopard. Moved the System to a Mac Pro (2009) BOOTED RIGHT UP! got to Yosemite, and it was a little rough with Server Settings and LDAP had to restructure and redo the LDAP, but all was good, and then just updated to macOS Sierra (after a 5,1 firmware), and the Mac Pro 2009 is flying! It has a Sonnet Tempo SSD inside, with 2 480GB SSDs in RAID 0, to help.
In fact about 6 months ago, the SSD PCI card died, but you know what? I had an internal WD 1 TB Black, Nightly Backup, and "No Love Lost, No Love Lost" - Joy Division... ran off the nightly, Sonnet shipped me out a new SSD PCIe card, (3 year warranty) they're BOSS, and boom CCC right back and here I am...
(One other Mac Pro, has survived from 10.4.3 to 10.7.5, and is still going now, same system).
How many Windows XP installations have still survived since install circa 2005?, besides those just still running XP at some "creepy hospitals'? haha
Yeah easily worth $40...
Does CCC just keep a mirrored copy of my hard drive? So, if I delete a file, would it delete in on my CCC backed drive as well? Or does it have a facility to restore from a point in time like Time Machine?
My biggest issue with Time Machine is that it drops files when it runs out of space. Granted, it is the oldest files, but not something I want a backup system to do, without my explicit action.
Maybe this basic difference between CCC and Time Machine is why you consider the programs complimentary. If so, it makes sense. Anyway Mike, I'm looking forward to your comparison between the 2 products.
CCC is mostly a wrapper around the unix tool rsync, which is bundled with OS X (type man rsync into terminal and hit space bar to read through the commands). CCC bundles a copy of rsync with the app:
You could replicate everything CCC does with the built-in OS X tools, it just makes it user-friendly. This software is intended for mirroring. CCC (and rsync) has the ability to keep old files but you can't restore to that point, you can only copy things out of that folder manually so e.g rolling back an OS wouldn't be a trivial task, there's a note here on restoring a previous OS version:
In order to do this, you'd need to keep a separate clone for each OS snapshot but the good thing with CCC is being able to clone portions of the drive so you can clone just the system separate from the files into say a disk image.
I reckon Apple's upcoming filesystem (APFS, 2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_System ) will make cloning much easier. It has the ability to instantly create snapshots of an OS and only writes the changes. This can easily allow bootable snapshots in Time Machine. You'd start with a full system. You maybe get a developer beta of the OS so you create a clone, which happens nearly instantly as it just links at the filesystem level to the original. The beta then writes into the clone but doesn't change the original. You can then test the system out fully and all writes go into the clone. To roll back, you can easily go back to the snapshot, which just ignores the writes in the new clone. This will be much easier for developers to work on OS betas but apps like CCC will likely still offer more control.
CCC is good for being able to exclude files/folders in backup profiles so you can have different profiles for different backups. Virtual machine images for example that might change very little but are large can be excluded from being cloned each time.
I'd like to see operating systems be a bit easier to install and manage. They could be authored as disk images, dropped onto a drive and it becomes a bootable system. As long as the machine can mount the image then it can boot from that. Then there would be a lot less headaches around system upgrades and rollbacks. You'd just copy a single file into place and that's the system ready to use. Anything writable goes outside that image. This goes for Mac, Linux and Windows. They can all be authored as disk images either in standard formats or in a format that can be mounted with a small software package at boot. If there can be a dynamic filesystem that accommodates easily adjustable partitions, setting up multiple systems would be basic. You could copy images for OS X, Windows and Linux onto a drive, create 3 filesystem containers, one for each with their own filesystem and they can expand/contract as needed and it would be nice if they could be simultaneously booted natively so no more need for virtual machines.
I love CCC and have used it for my backups for ages now. But I wonder at AppleInsider posting about a "new" version on December 27 when this latest version came out on December 8...
Maybe I'm just cheap, but I don't think this program is worth $40. It used to be free and then all of a sudden its magically worth $40! I can basically use Time Machine to do the same thing for free.
If you think Time Machine does the same thing then you didn't read the article you are commenting on.
This review should have gone into more detail about other options though.
I have this version which was around $20 to upgrade from the previous version.
Comments
An independent developer going from free to $40 is anything but weird. Nothing like Apple charging for OS updates.
And CCC does TONS of things TM doesn't do! : ) Aside from the wealth of customization and scheduling it gives useful and thorough info when things are not as expected. TM gives...no info. It might churn for 24 hours and then give no info what's wrong. When TM works, which is most of the time for most people, it's great. But it truly is the definition of one-trick-pony, useful as that trick is. The few customizations you can make to it are oddly interfaced and limited. This is why no one is "bitching up a storm" about CCC being $40! : ) It's very much like saying "Why should I buy XYZ drive utility when I have Apple's Disk Utility?
Go to the Bombich site and read through it, skipping the "Simple Mode", which is sort of comparable to TM.
In the extraordinarily rare instance that we do them, they're clearly labeled as such.
My backup strategy is very simple. I create a new, full SuperDuper image before any major software update and store it on my external USB-C SSD drive. This process takes about 9 minutes total. The image for my complete system is about 87GB which includes data. Any new or changed data files that are added between those images are stored locally and to both iCloud and OneDrive. Any photo images that I import through Lightroom to my local (SSD) drive are also automatically set to copy to the external SSD drive to a separate filesystem (from the system image) during import. Very quick and my data is located in multiple locations. Works great with a laptop scenario.
Carbon Copy Cloner definitely has many more options - that I personally have no use for which is the reason that I chose SuperDuper. For me it's as simple as: 1) click the app to open, 2) Click the Backup button (it remembers that last backup setup i.e. Origin and Destination drives), 3) wait 9 or so minutes, 4) Close the app. Now I have a complete, bootable image of my entire system and data. Restores are identical except of course you would boot off the external image, run SuperDuper, select restore and then reboot your system locally. All done.
The app is completely cost-free to use to make images and perform restores. I did pay the $27.95 fee to be able to use the Smart Backups and Sandbox options if I choose to in the future but have yet to find a need for it. I would surely consider CCC for a production environment or someone that has a complex home setup. I find that both products are well worth their fees and that both are very stable, reliable products. Just another option to consider...you can't go wrong either way.
Time Machine is a different animal and not directly comparable. You should ideally use both as they each have their advantages.
CCC for nightly server backups (approx 150 TB)
SuperDuper for boot drive replication (mostly for swapping HDD to SSD)
Chronosync for offsites (the chronocync agent is great)
Time Machine for backup during the work day (restoring a full disk from TM is tedious at best)
when the real estate market (or any market) dropped it didn't matter one bit what a house was worth before, only what it's worth *now*. twenty years ago the houses in my neighborhood were a fraction of what they are today, but if i offered an older price to a seller because that's what it used to be, they'd laugh me out of the room.
anyway as as someone else pointed out it was donationware and not free.
My CCC backs up to an 18TB (5 drive) Drobo with 2 disc redundancy.
P.S. I've been using Macs for over 35 years. I've been using computers since 1963 (Mainframes in college), so I know, likely more than many, how critical it is to back up your work on a daily basis.
Does CCC just keep a mirrored copy of my hard drive? So, if I delete a file, would it delete in on my CCC backed drive as well? Or does it have a facility to restore from a point in time like Time Machine?
My biggest issue with Time Machine is that it drops files when it runs out of space. Granted, it is the oldest files, but not something I want a backup system to do, without my explicit action.
Maybe this basic difference between CCC and Time Machine is why you consider the programs complimentary. If so, it makes sense. Anyway Mike, I'm looking forward to your comparison between the 2 products.
https://bombich.com/kb/ccc4/credits
You could replicate everything CCC does with the built-in OS X tools, it just makes it user-friendly. This software is intended for mirroring. CCC (and rsync) has the ability to keep old files but you can't restore to that point, you can only copy things out of that folder manually so e.g rolling back an OS wouldn't be a trivial task, there's a note here on restoring a previous OS version:
https://bombich.com/kb/ccc4/frequently-asked-questions-about-carbon-copy-cloner-safetynet
In order to do this, you'd need to keep a separate clone for each OS snapshot but the good thing with CCC is being able to clone portions of the drive so you can clone just the system separate from the files into say a disk image.
I reckon Apple's upcoming filesystem (APFS, 2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_System ) will make cloning much easier. It has the ability to instantly create snapshots of an OS and only writes the changes. This can easily allow bootable snapshots in Time Machine. You'd start with a full system. You maybe get a developer beta of the OS so you create a clone, which happens nearly instantly as it just links at the filesystem level to the original. The beta then writes into the clone but doesn't change the original. You can then test the system out fully and all writes go into the clone. To roll back, you can easily go back to the snapshot, which just ignores the writes in the new clone. This will be much easier for developers to work on OS betas but apps like CCC will likely still offer more control.
CCC is good for being able to exclude files/folders in backup profiles so you can have different profiles for different backups. Virtual machine images for example that might change very little but are large can be excluded from being cloned each time.
I'd like to see operating systems be a bit easier to install and manage. They could be authored as disk images, dropped onto a drive and it becomes a bootable system. As long as the machine can mount the image then it can boot from that. Then there would be a lot less headaches around system upgrades and rollbacks. You'd just copy a single file into place and that's the system ready to use. Anything writable goes outside that image. This goes for Mac, Linux and Windows. They can all be authored as disk images either in standard formats or in a format that can be mounted with a small software package at boot. If there can be a dynamic filesystem that accommodates easily adjustable partitions, setting up multiple systems would be basic. You could copy images for OS X, Windows and Linux onto a drive, create 3 filesystem containers, one for each with their own filesystem and they can expand/contract as needed and it would be nice if they could be simultaneously booted natively so no more need for virtual machines.
Also for those who compared the $40 price to Apple's giving away OS updates these days, MacOS is not how Apple makes its money, and CCC is how Bombich makes theirs, for which they deserve to be paid a price that makes it worth their continuing to keep the product supported, fully functioning and up to date.
Thanks for the detailed explanation!