Backing Up to disk images or other macs on your network

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 menus. After a brief setup procedure to establish trust between your machine and the destination machine, simply indicate the IP address or hostname of the machine to which you have access and CCC will take care of the rest.

Manually restoring individual files and folders

You can access the contents of a disk image the same way that you access other volumes and external hard drives on OS X. Double-click on the disk image file to mount its filesystem, then navigate the filesystem in the Finder to access individual files and folders. If you have the permission to access the files that you would like to restore, simply drag those items to the volume that you would like to restore them to.

Sometimes backing up your data to a single external hard drive is just too messy and difficult to organize. Suppose, for example, that you have three computers in your household, and everyone backs up to the same external hard drive. Where do you put each person's backup? The single hard drive can't maintain multiple operating systems, OS X does not support that. You could split the drive into three partitions, but that isn't very flexible at all. You could clone each person's drive to a folder on the drive, but that's a little difficult to restore from.

Carbon Copy Cloner can be used to back up several Macs to one particular Mac on your network. This can be a good method of reducing the number of hard drives that you use for backup, and can also help you consolidate your data, making offsite backup easier. The following illustrates an example scenario.

For "improved detachability", OS X will unmount any non-internal volumes that are attached to the system when you log out. So, for example, if you log out of your computer while a USB or Firewire hard drive enclosure is attached, you can detach those hard drive enclosures from the system without having to manually unmount them first. This is a good thing — it would be annoying if you had to log back in to your system just to eject a drive.

The restore procedure is nearly identical to the backup procedure: