Knowledge Base: Carbon Copy Cloner 4
Lost Your Registration?
This documentation is for an older version of CCC. The documentation for the current version (v6) is here. You can find the documentation for the previous version of CCC (v3) here.
Purchasing CCC
- How does the free 30-day trial work?
- If I pay for CCC now, will I have to pay for future updates?
- Can I use one license of CCC on multiple Macs in my household?
- Do you offer an academic discount?
- Can I give CCC as a gift?
- Do you offer a volume licensing program?
- Why isn't CCC on the Mac App Store?
- Do you offer telephone support?
- en Sales Terms and Conditions
Downloading, Installing and Registering CCC
- How do I download and install Carbon Copy Cloner?
- System Requirements for Carbon Copy Cloner
- Can I download the old versions of Carbon Copy Cloner?
- How to Register CCC in One Click
- How to Manually Enter a CCC Registration Code
- Trouble Applying Your Registration Information?
- How do I use one license of CCC on multiple Macs in my household?
- I already purchased CCC but can't find my registration code. Can you send it to me?
- Oops, that license code is invalid...
- Migrating CCC tasks from one system to another
Using CCC
- How to set up your first backup
- How to verify or test your backup
- How to restore from your backup
- How to set up a scheduled backup
- How to modify a scheduled backup
- Monitoring backup tasks with the CCC menubar application
- Configuring Email Notifications
- How to find out when a backup last ran: CCC Task History
- Protecting data that is already on your destination volume: The Carbon Copy Cloner SafetyNet
- The Disk Center
- Cloning Apple's Recovery HD partition
- Simple Mode
- Notes for VoiceOver users
- Granting Full Disk Access to CCC's helper tool
Sample Usage Scenarios
- I want to clone my entire hard drive to a new hard drive or a new machine
- I want to back up my whole Mac to a Time Capsule, NAS, or other network volume
- I want to back up multiple Macs or source volumes to the same hard drive
- Can I run a backup while I'm using my computer? If I have open files, will they be backed up?
- Can I back up one computer and use the clone to restore another computer?
- I have a clone created by another application. Will CCC recognize that data, or will it want to recopy everything?
- Can CCC back up my BootCamp (Windows) partition?
- Can I use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone a Time Machine backup?
- Cloning one external hard drive to another external hard drive
- Restoring an item from a hidden folder
- Folder-to-Folder Backups
Troubleshooting
- How do I get help?
- "The disk usage on the destination doesn't match the source — did CCC miss some files?"
- Help! My clone won't boot!
- Some applications behave differently or ask for the serial number on the cloned volume. Did CCC miss something?
- Identifying and Troubleshooting Hardware-Related Problems
- Keeping CCC up to date
- Uninstalling CCC
- Slow performance of network appliances can be mitigated by backing up to a disk image
- "CCC reported that the destination is full. What can I do to avoid this?"
- Antivirus software may interfere with a backup
- Why is CCC recopying every file during each backup?
- "CCC found multiple volumes with the same Universally Unique Identifier"
- Finder or App Store finds other versions of applications on the backup volume
- "The task was aborted because a subtask did not complete in a reasonable amount of time"
- Troubleshooting slow performance when copying files to or from a network volume
- Where can I find CCC's log file?
- Why can't I eject the destination volume after the backup task has completed?
Advanced Topics
- Excluding files and folders from a backup task
- Advanced Settings
- Performance Suggestions
- Working with FileVault Encryption
- Some files and folders are automatically excluded from a backup task
- Performing actions Before and After the backup task
- Restoring non-system files
- Backing up to a disk image
- Restoring from a disk image
- I have a full-volume backup in a folder or a disk image, but I don't have a bootable backup. How can I restore everything?
- Using Carbon Copy Cloner to back up to/from another Macintosh on your network
- A caveat for backing up to a remote Macintosh that has no user logged in
- Restoring from a backup on a remote Macintosh
- I want to defragment my hard drive
- Frequently Asked Questions about encrypting the backup volume
- Frequently asked questions about scheduled tasks
- Frequently asked questions about the Carbon Copy Cloner SafetyNet
- Frequently Asked Questions about cloning Apple's "Recovery HD" partition
- Using the ccc Command Line Tool to Start, Stop, and Monitor CCC Backup Tasks
- Backing up databases on OS X Server
- Backing up large files, mounted disk images, and Virtual Machine containers
- Automated maintenance of the CCC SafetyNet folder
- "My disk is already formatted HFS+, why am I getting this warning?"
- Backing up to/from network volumes and other non-HFS volumes
- What makes a volume bootable?
- A closer look at how CCC determines the "bootability" of a destination volume
- Configuring Scheduled Task Runtime Conditions
- Modifying CCC's Security Configuration
- Creating a separate task to prevent VM container versions from bloating the SafetyNet
- Outgoing network connections made by CCC
- When I boot from my backup, Little Snitch reports that its rules have been replaced by a different version. Why, and how can I avoid this?
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
- Glossary of Terms
- "The disk usage on the destination doesn't match the source — did CCC miss some files?"
- I want to back up multiple Macs or source volumes to the same hard drive
- Can I run a backup while I'm using my computer? If I have open files, will they be backed up?
- Some applications behave differently or ask for the serial number on the cloned volume. Did CCC miss something?
- Can I back up one computer and use the clone to restore another computer?
- Identifying and Troubleshooting Hardware-Related Problems
- I have a clone created by another application. Will CCC recognize that data, or will it want to recopy everything?
- Can CCC back up my BootCamp (Windows) partition?
- Slow performance of network appliances can be mitigated by backing up to a disk image
- Can I use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone a Time Machine backup?
- "CCC reported that the destination is full. What can I do to avoid this?"
- Frequently Asked Questions about encrypting the backup volume
- Frequently asked questions about scheduled tasks
- Frequently asked questions about the Carbon Copy Cloner SafetyNet
- Frequently Asked Questions about cloning Apple's "Recovery HD" partition
- Can I run backup tasks while my system is on battery power?
- Can I run my backups more frequently than Hourly?