Bombich Software Blog

Did you ever wonder, "How did CCC find 20GB of content to update during that backup? What exactly is changing on my startup disk every day?" CCC's task audit was designed to answer those questions, and it often comes in clutch when those arrive on our Help Desk. Here are a couple cases that came up recently that show how handy this insightful feature can be.

Case #1: Every backup copies more data than expected

We get a lot of support requests that aren't really a problem with a backup. The exercise of doing the backup and paying attention to it, however, reveals that "something isn't right". Eric was noticing that his backup tasks copied ~76GB data every night, and he wondered, "How can that much data be changing every day?"

A quick review of CCC's logs revealed that the "largest file encountered" was a whopping 70GB. That's not too uncommon when folks are using Virtual Machine containers, but usually in those cases people already know that they have a really large file; that didn't fit in this case.

I suggested that Eric browse through the task audit to see if anything pops out. CCC's task audit aims to...

One of the big reasons people don't back up more often? Backups take too long. On a disk that's filled with data, even a routine backup can drag on — not because much changed, but because CCC has to stop and check every file and folder just to find out. CCC's Quick Update feature cuts straight to the chase: it asks macOS which folders actually changed and skips everything else. Faster backups mean you can comfortably back up more often, which means your backups are more likely to be fresh when you need them.

How does Quick Update work?

macOS has a handy service that tracks filesystem activity on your local drives. When a backup task runs, CCC can ask this "FSEvents" service for a list of folders that contain files that have been modified since the last time the backup task ran. CCC then limits its comparison activity to only that smaller collection of folders, rather than performing an exhaustive enumeration of every file and folder on the source and destination.

Why is Quick Update so much faster?

When you're dealing with slower storage like most backup disks, it might take a...

Your Mac backup drive holds years of photos, financial records, work files — an external copy of nearly everything on your Mac. But what if that backup drive slips out of your bag at the airport, gets swiped from your car, or is taken in a home burglary? Without encryption, whoever has that drive has everything on it. With FileVault encryption enabled, they have nothing but unreadable data. This is what's known as "at-rest" protection, and Carbon Copy Cloner makes it a one-click setting on any APFS backup volume.

How do I enable encryption on my CCC backup?

When you initially select a volume as a destination to a backup task, CCC's Backup Volume Setup Assistant will offer an option to enable encryption. Simply check the box to enable encryption and provide the password that you would like to use to unlock the volume. If your backups are already configured, you can do the following to enable encryption on a volume:

1. Click Volumes in CCC's sidebar.
2. Select your backup volume in the sidebar.
3. Toggle the FileVault switch to the On position.
4. Enter a password to use for unlocking the volume, then encryption conversion will begin.