What we're testing in this beta cycle

We made some adjustments around the sending of email notifications
Most of this should be transparent; please let us know if you see any problems with sending emails or the content of those emails.

We added support for OAUTH authentication via "Sign in with Microsoft" for sending email notifications
If you have an Outlook or Office 365 account and you use email notifications in CCC, please give the new consent flow a whirl in CCC Settings > Email Settings and let us know if you encounter any problems.

We refactored CCC's internal stall-detection mechanism
This mechanism now detects stalls across the entire breadth of a task event (i.e. preflight, postflight activity), rather than just the file copying portion of the task. This also should be transparent, but it was a pretty large refactoring project, so let us know if you see any anomalies with general task event logistics, or any "subtask timed out" errors.

We surfaced an error that was previously suppressed
If your backup task runs when the screen is locked, or no user is logged in, files flagged with the "NSFileProtectionComplete" data protection class attribute cannot be opened. In the past, CCC didn't distinguish between "files protected by SIP" vs. "files protected via NSFileProtectionComplete", and the errors were logged, but not presented to the user. Now CCC does distinguish that difference, and raises these as errors, along with instructions to repeat the backup while the system is unlocked, and an option to ignore the error on a file-by-file basis. There is also a global toggle to suppress all of these errors. Please share your feedback about the new handling of these errors via CCC's Help menu > Ask a question.

Changes in CCC 7.1.7

• Improved

  b3 and b4: Refined the handling of the new NSFileProtection error. CCC's Task History window now offers an "Ignore this error for this file" button so you can make a choice on the handling of these errors on a file-by-file basis. b4 addresses an issue with how the "ignored" file paths are compared that led to ignored errors not getting consistently ignored.

• Fixed

  b3: Addressed a regression introduced in 7.1.7-b1 that was causing CCC to recopy files in the following scenario: source is a NAS, file has a resource fork and an empty data fork, extended attribute support is enabled.

• Fixed

  b3: Addressed a regression introduced in 7.1.7-b1 that was causing CCC to present a "subtask timeout" error for Legacy Bootable Copy tasks.

• Improved

  b2: Made a small adjustment to accommodate a SAMBA configuration that hides certain files by default. When that policy is applied, the server ignores changes to the "hidden" file flag, and the absence of that flag was causing some files (e.g. "Icon\r") to reappear in CCC's Task audit every time the task runs (i.e. because CCC was repeatedly trying to reapply the flag).

• New

  b2: The "When files are modified on the source" scheduling setting now allows the destination volume to remain unmounted while monitoring the source. When the FSEvents threshold is met, CCC will mount and validate the destination, if necessary, then proceed with the file copying portion of the task. Likewise, the postflight option to unmount the destination is now available to tasks scheduled with this setting.

• New

  b2: The "When files are modified on the source" scheduling setting is now allowed with network volume destinations. If the NAS volume is not mounted when the task initializes monitoring, CCC will not actively mount it until the FSEvents thresholds are met. This assuages our previous concerns about the NAS volume being "sleepy" when it comes time to actually write files. Now we mount it on-demand at the moment that we need it, and keep it unmounted otherwise.

• Improved

  Added support for OAUTH authentication via "Sign in with Microsoft" for sending email notifications.

• Improved

  Improved the way the ccc command-line utility presents active task progress indication when using the --watch argument.

• Improved

  Removed TouchBar support.