by Sarah
| December 22, 2015
We will be closing December 24 at noon EST and remain closed December 25. We will also close December 31 at noon EST and remain closed January 1 to spend the holidays with our families.
Limited staff are available to respond to customer requests until January 4. We appreciate your patience if it takes a bit longer for us to respond than is typical.
by Mike
| December 2, 2015
We hear this concern frequently:
"I'm considering buying CCC, but I am concerned that a new OS will come out and I will be asked to purchase a new license to continue using CCC."
Generally when a new OS is released, we offer a free update to CCC that allows users to continue using it with the same license on the new OS. That has been the case with 8 out of the last 9 major OS releases over the last 13 years, with the notable exception being Yosemite, which broke CCC 3. That being a recent experience, many users share this concern. I would like to succinctly alleviate these concerns with the following statements:
CCC 4 will be qualified and supported on OS X 10.12. We will issue a free update for that OS, just as we did for 10.11 El Capitan.
CCC 4 license holders will not be prohibited from using CCC 4.1.5 (or later) on OS X 10.13 and later
In the past, CCC refused to open on newer OSes* because we were concerned that a future OS version would break CCC in a manner that could lead to data loss. CCC 4.1.5 introduces a mechanism that can proactively warn users if this situation arises, so we no longer restrict that version of CCC from running on a future version of OS X. If you're interested in the longer version of this explanation, see this article: Coping with Apple's pace of innovation in an application that can delete files.
* Again, though, understand that CCC 3.5.7 was broken on Yosemite. While the aforementioned restriction would prevent that version of CCC from opening on Yosemite, it was the underlying architectural limitations of CCC 3.x that made it not work on Yosemite.
by Mike
| September 10, 2015
We released CCC 4.1.4 last week with a handful of minor bug fixes, as well as some enhancements and a stamp of approval for use with OS X 10.11 "El Capitan". This update is free for CCC 4 license holders, and recommended for anyone currently running CCC 4.
With the announcement of a ship date for El Capitan, perhaps you are counting down the days to when you can inflict it upon your production Mac. Or perhaps, like me, you're going to test it on your kid's Mac first and hope it doesn't wreck his Minecraft worlds. In either case, now is a great time to take another look at your backup hygiene. Many people don't realize this, but if you apply the "next major OS" upgrade to your Mac, Apple makes it darn near impossible to go back. The rub lies primarily within Apple applications such as Mail, Calendar, Address Book, etc. When you upgrade to the next OS, the data stores for these applications are upgraded as well, in a manner that is not backwards-compatible. So if you loaded El Capitan onto your system and realized that some major piece of productivity software doesn't work, getting back to Yosemite is not only challenging and time consuming, but you're also going to have a lot of trouble getting your email to work. That is, of course, unless you have a bootable backup of your pre-upgrade system.
Before you upgrade, make a bootable backup of your current system with Carbon Copy Cloner, detach the backup disk and set it on a shelf. Learn more about how to protect yourself from upgrade calamities here: Getting Ready for the El Capitan Upgrade
El Capitan introduces a new feature called "System Integrity Protection" (SIP). A few people have asked us whether CCC "works" with SIP, and the short answer is, "Yes, absolutely". SIP doesn't have any implications for a bootable backup solution. Carbon Copy Cloner 4.1.4 is fully qualified with 10.11 El Capitan. Bootable backups created by CCC will preserve SIP, and SIP will be perfectly functional and happy on a cloned or restored system. To address the specific concerns raised by a few people, CCC can copy and set the "com.apple.rootless" extended attribute on system folders and files that are on the backup volume. I wouldn't be able to do that on the startup disk (SIP prevents that), but I'd never want to do that anyway; it would be foolish to make changes to the system files on the volume you're currently booted from.
by Mike
| July 10, 2015
We posted a beta of CCC for El Capitan beta testers back in June and I'm happy to report that our testing of CCC 4.1.4 (beta) has been going well on the new OS. So far we haven't found any significant problems. We've made a couple adjustments to how the Recovery HD partition is cloned, but that change was relatively minor. Backups are bootable, scheduled tasks are running on schedule, smart updating is updating smartly, backups to network volumes are working great. On the whole, this appears to be a low-impact OS change. That's perfectly fine with me, I can spend my summer on new feature work!
If you're participating in Apple's El Capitan beta testing program, you can help us test CCC on the new OS. To access the CCC beta update within CCC (e.g. before installing the El Capitan beta), open CCC's Preferences window, click on Software Update, check the Inform me of beta releases checkbox, then click the Check for updates now button. If you're already running the El Capitan beta, you can download the CCC beta directly [NOTE: no longer available].
If you're using CCC on El Capitan, please let us know what you think and inform us of any problems you encounter while beta testing by choosing Report a Problem from CCC's Help menu. If anything looks or feels a bit different (or just plain wrong), don't assume that we know about it. If you don't report it, it might not get fixed. Thanks!
On September 1, we posted CCC 4.1.4, which is now fully qualified on OS X El Capitan.
by Mike
| June 1, 2015
We're on the cusp of Apple's next Worldwide Developer Conference, and like many other developers, we've started to expect a new OS announcement during the Keynote. That inevitably raises the question, "Will CCC work with that new OS?"? The short answer is yes — by the time Apple ships that OS, we'll have CCC completely qualified and running on that OS. I posted a much longer explanation last year, however, that explains why the current version of CCC will not open on that new OS:
Will CCC work with [insert Apple's pre-release OS here]?
Long story short, the OS has far too many potential changes — changes in the filesystem, changes in services, system behavior, bootability requirements, etc. — it just doesn't make sense to blindly hope that it will just work. If we developed a calendar or drawing application, I'd be more comfortable allowing it to run on a new, untested OS. I don't play fast and loose with user data though, there's too much at risk.
Here's a timeline of how we anticipate things working in the next few weeks, on the assumption that Apple does actually announce a new OS:
And, of course, what many people will be asking us...
It is our intention to issue a nominal compatibility update to CCC 4 that is qualified on the next major OS by the time that OS is made available to the general public. This update will be free to existing CCC 4 license holders.
Today we posted CCC 4.1.4-b2 which offers preliminary support for OS X 10.11, El Capitan, which is currently available for beta testing. To apply the update within CCC (before upgrading to El Capitan), open CCC's Preferences window, click on Software Update, check the Inform me of beta releases checkbox, then click the Check for updates now button. If you're already running El Capitan, you can download the beta directly [NOTE: no longer available].
If you're using CCC on El Capitan (beta), please let us know what you think and inform... Read More
