Carbon Copy Cloner
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System Requirements for Carbon Copy Cloner

This documentation is for an older version of CCC. You can find the latest version here.
Last updated on February 16, 2021

System Requirements

  • OS X 10.10 Yosemite
  • OS X 10.11 El Capitan
  • macOS 10.12 Sierra
  • macOS 10.13 High Sierra
  • macOS 10.14 Mojave
  • macOS 10.15 Catalina
  • macOS 11 Big Sur

Older versions of CCC are still available for users running older OSes. Note that these older versions are not actively being developed and support is provided on a case-by-case basis.

Supported configurations

  • HFS+ formatted volume is required for a bootable backup of macOS 10.10 through 10.12.
  • APFS or HFS+ formatted volume is required for a bootable backup of macOS 10.13 High Sierra and Mojave
  • APFS formatted volume is required for a bootable backup of macOS 10.15 Catalina and later
  • APFS source and destination volumes are only supported on macOS 10.13 High Sierra and later
  • Backup of user data is supported on some non-Apple-formatted (i.e. not HFS+ or APFS) filesystems
  • SSDs and hard disk drives1 in Firewire2, Thunderbolt and USB enclosures3
  • CCC is supported only on Apple Macintoshes that officially support OS X 10.10 Yosemite (or higher)
  • A minimum screen resolution of 1024x768 is required

1: APFS performs poorly on HDDs with a rotational speed of less than 7200RPM
2: macOS Catalina+ does not support booting a Mac via a FireWire-attached device
3: Not all hard drive enclosures are capable of booting macOS. See the Preparing a hard drive for use with Carbon Copy Cloner and Help! My clone won't boot sections of the CCC documentation for more information on disk formatting, partitioning, and general bootability concerns. These restrictions apply to the ability of the device to boot a Mac, any of these devices are suitable for general backup.

Configurations that are not supported

  • CCC will not clone to or from an unformatted or unmounted device — the source and destination must have a filesystem recognized by macOS and visible in the Finder
  • Cloning Windows system files is not a supported configuration
  • CCC will not backup directly to optical media (e.g. CD-ROM or DVD-ROM)
  • WebDAV, FTP, NFS and other "cloud" destinations are not supported
  • macOS Mojave and later cannot boot from a RAID device
  • CCC is not a two-way synchronization solution designed to keep two Macs in sync with each other — this is not a supported configuration.
  • Performing mass deployments with CCC is not supported. Apple discourages this sort of deployment and offers additional resources here, and there are alternative solutions to consider.
  • We can only support cloning versions of macOS that are supported by Apple on your hardware. For example, we cannot help you get Catalina running on a 2008 MacPro. Likewise, you cannot clone Mojave onto a 2019 MacBook Pro that shipped with Catalina. If Apple doesn't support it, we cannot support it.
  • CCC can copy virtual machine container files, but copying to or from a virtual machine is not supportable.