Some files and folders are automatically excluded from a backup task

Product: 
ccc4

Carbon Copy Cloner maintains a list of certain files and folders that are automatically excluded from a backup task. The contents of this list were determined based on Apple recommendations and years of experience. The following is a list of the items that are excluded along with an explanation of why they are excluded.

A closer look at how CCC determines the "bootability" of a destination volume

Product: 
ccc4

CCC determines whether your destination volume will be bootable and indicates any configuration concerns in the "Cloning Coach" window. If you see a yellow warning icon in the Task Plan header, you can click on that icon to see these concerns. CCC will also present these concerns to you the first time that you configure a backup task to any particular destination volume.

Backing up to a disk image

Product: 
ccc4

Disk images are not bootable backups. To create a bootable backup, you must back up to a hard drive that is attached directly to your Mac. We recommend that you only use a disk image if you are backing up to a network volume.

If you're backing up more than 4TB of data, please consider carefully whether a disk image is the right fit for your backup needs.

Automated maintenance of the CCC SafetyNet folder

Product: 
ccc4

Carbon Copy Cloner will move previous versions of modified files, as well as files deleted since previous backup tasks to a SafetyNet folder at the root of the destination. If left unmanaged, this SafetyNet folder would eventually consume all free space on your destination volume. To prevent that from happening, CCC offers three different ways of managing the contents of the SafetyNet folder. You can customize this behavior by clicking on the "Use Advanced Settings" button in CCC's main window.

Frequently Asked Questions about encrypting the backup volume

Using Carbon Copy Cloner to back up to/from another Macintosh on your network

Product: 
ccc4

Carbon Copy Cloner offers the option of securely copying your selected data to another Macintosh on your network (or anywhere on the Internet for that matter) via the "Remote Macintosh..." options in the Source and Destination selectors. After a brief setup procedure to establish trust between your Mac and the destination Mac, simply indicate the IP address or hostname of the remote Mac and CCC will take care of the rest.

Backing up databases on OS X Server

Product: 
ccc4

Databases are proprietary file types that often cannot be backed up in the conventional manner. In CCC, you can leverage a preflight shell script to perform an "out of band" backup of various databases using database-specific tools. The CCC backup task will subsequently back up the database archive files, from which you could restore the database at a later time.

The following pre-clone shell script will dump the contents of any MySQL databases. In the event that your standard backup of the database doesn't open, you can later restore it from the dump.

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

Product: 
ccc4

Carbon Copy Cloner offers complete support for archiving, cloning, and recreating Apple's Recovery HD partition. See the Cloning Apple's Recovery HD partition section of CCC's Disk Center documentation for instructions to create a Recovery HD volume on your backup disk.