Carbon Copy Cloner 7.1
For Sonoma and Sequoia users, CCC now offers an option to set a custom icon on locally-attached source and destination volumes. Select an image of your own, or get creative with Apple’s new Image Playground.
I’ve been doing this manually (dragging into Finder’s Get Info window), and I find that it really helps to have different icon colors and badges to quickly tell which drive is which.
This version of CCC embraces new macOS functionality that allows us to avoid installing the CCC helper tool into Macintosh HD > Library > PrivilegedHelperTools. The helper tool will be "registered" with macOS, but will remain inside of the CCC application bundle. This new practice resolves a long list of complications that have arisen over the years with the legacy LaunchDaemon configuration as Apple has improved macOS platform security.
I’m guessing this uses SMAppService.
The Snapshot Comparison Browser search field now supports wildcard and regular expression searches.
The biggest backup problem I’ve been seeing lately—and I don’t think it’s really CCC’s fault—is that it’s sometimes unable to automatically prune old APFS snapshots, so the destination volume ends up full, and the backup fails. CCC usually does a better job than Disk Utility at showing the snapshots, though in some cases neither is able to delete them. Disk Utility recommends restarting the Mac, which is a really pain but does sometimes help. It’s unclear to me what causes the problem and why ejecting and remounting the drive isn’t enough. I wonder if there’s some sort of APFS issue because oftentimes the oldest bunch of snapshots show zero for the size, and deleting them doesn’t seem to free up any space. Is this because CCC had started deleting them but was only partially successful? (I would have thought this would be atomic.) Or because they lost data?
And sometimes the snapshots seem to be totally undetectable or even unviewable, with Disk Utility on Sequoia reporting permissions errors if I try to repair the drive. I tried another Sequoia Mac with no luck. A Mac with an older version of macOS made more progress with two of the drives damaged in this way, successfully scanning the snapshots that Sequoia had not been able to see, but ultimately it found errors that it couldn’t fix. With the old snapshots inaccessible, anyway, I ended up reformatting the drives. I never had these types of problems before, so I wonder whether Sequoia somehow damaged these drives or whether it’s just bad luck.
Spotlight will now be disabled on the destination by default when selecting the option to use a destination volume exclusively for the CCC task in the Backup Volume Setup Assistant. Users can also select a volume in the sidebar and disable (or re-enable) Spotlight via a switch. This change will hopefully address the interference that Spotlight and its mediaanalysisd buddy are causing with regard to unmounting CCC destination volumes.
Yay! I find Spotlight useless with backup drives. It seems to slow things down at best or sometimes cause worse problems like not being able to eject the drive, which also seems to be a new issue with Sequoia.
Previously:
- SuperDuper 3.10 Beta Works Around asr Bug
- What to Do When macOS Won’t Let You Unmount a Volume
- Carbon Copy Cloner 7
- Ive Drives Icons
- Ventura’s “Open at Login” vs. “Allow in the Background”
2 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I totally gave up on backup options and just use CCC to clone my entire 4Tb internal drive to a 4Tb external SSD. That's about as simple as I can make it, I just do an incremental backup twice daily. I am sure it's not bootable but I hope it's good enough for a complete recovery if I had to reformat my Mac. I'm not sure if there is any better backup strategy, I'd rather keep backup drives dismounted but I had trouble mounting and dismounting volumes within CCC.
Also quite nice you can use CCC to turn off spotlight on *any* external drive even if not being used for backups.
Now, if I could only stop my Time Machine external drive from auto-mounting…
