Example backup scenarios

It takes a person of strong resolution to manually back up data frequently enough to prevent a catastrophic loss. For the rest of us, there's task scheduling. Carbon Copy Cloner offers hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly scheduling. If your workstyle is too hectic for scheduling, you can also create a task that is intended to be run manually, or schedule a task to run whenever your backup hard drive is attached to your computer.

Backing up multiple volumes or multiple Macs to a single hard drive can be a messy proposition. If you back up each source volume to the same destination volume without some pre-planning, data from each source volume will be merged in a heap on the backup volume. Additionally, your tasks will archive or delete each other's backed up content. Carbon Copy Cloner can solve this problem! We lay out a few different scenarios and solutions below.

In addition to backing up to volumes formatted with the OS X standard "HFS+" format, CCC can back up user data to network volumes (e.g. AFP and SMB via OS X and Windows File Sharing) and to other non-HFS+ formatted volumes such as FAT32. Non-HFS+ formatted volumes are presented in CCC's Source and Destination menus in the same manner as HFS+ formatted volumes, so there are no special steps required for backing up to or from these filesystems.

A welcome side-effect of cloning one volume to another is that the files on the resulting volume are largely defragmented. While fragmentation is not as significant of an issue as it used to be (e.g. in the Mac OS 9 days), people that have begun to fill the last 10-15% of their boot volume may see some performance benefit from defragmentation. If you find yourself in this situation, this is also a really good time to consider migrating to a larger hard drive altogether.

Time Capsule and other network storage appliances are becoming very popular for providing shared "personal cloud" storage. Naturally, this storage looks very appealing as a backup destination. The thought of backing up all of your stuff without having to plug in a cable is very alluring. Indeed, this storage is well suited for the sharing of media files, but there are some logistical and practical hurdles to backing up large amounts of data, as well as backing up OS X system data to these devices.

Storing your backup on a locally attached hard drive certainly offers speed and space benefits, but if you'd like to store the backups for one or several machines in a central location, or even offsite, then being able to directly backup to another Macintosh on your network is paramount.

There are many different reasons to make an exact clone of your hard drive. Suppose your laptop is damaged and you must send it in for repair. In the meantime, you not only have to borrow another computer for the duration of the repair, you also don't have your data, applications and work environment exactly as they were on your machine. This lack of organization can be very frustrating and inhibit your productivity. When you get your machine back from repair, you have to deal with locating any modified documents on your loaner computer and copying them to your original computer.