Frequently asked questions and troubleshooting

CCC can back up the contents of the Boot Camp partition, but it cannot make a bootable clone of the partition. If your goal is to back up your user data on the Boot Camp partition, CCC will meet your needs. If you're looking to migrate your Boot Camp partition to a new hard drive, you might consider an alternative solution such as WinClone, or one of the commercial virtualization solutions that offer a migration strategy from Boot Camp.

Occasionally a circumstance arises in which CCC presents the following error message before creating or running a scheduled backup task:

When Carbon Copy Cloner performs a block-level clone of your source volume to your destination volume, it proceeds in two stages: the cloning stage and the verification stage. Before it begins, both the source and destination are unmounted to prevent any external modifications to each filesystem. During the cloning stage, blocks are read from the source volume and written to the destination volume. While blocks are read from the source volume, a checksum of those blocks is calculated.

Can I use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my Time Machine backup?

For important, albeit technical reasons, Carbon Copy Cloner will avoid copying the Time Machine "Backups.backupdb" folder in a file-level copy. It is often possible, however, to clone a Time Machine volume with CCC using a block-level copy:

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 more details.

Some application preferences on OS X are considered "host-specific." Host-specific preferences will be ignored if you boot your cloned operating system from another Macintosh. For example, the Launchpad (Lion+) and screen saver preferences are host-specific -- if you boot another Macintosh from your bootable clone, you will notice that Launchpad and the screensaver are reflecting the default settings. This does not mean that CCC did not preserve your preferences files, it simply means that these applications do not respect the preferences files while booted from another Macintosh.