Carbon Copy Cloner Help
			Using Carbon Copy Cloner to create an exact clone of your hard drive

Carbon Copy Cloner's most basic and revered task is to create a "carbon copy" bootable clone of a hard drive. CCC 3 takes this to a new level with Apple Software Restore, a low-level tool developed by Apple and built-in to Mac OS X. Apple Software Restore is the most highly regarded tool for performing disk to disk clones, and Carbon Copy Cloner brings all the functionality and more to your desktop. To clone a hard drive using Carbon Copy Cloner, use the "Fast, simple backup of everything" method listed under Cloning options:

Options to the "Fast, simple backup of everything" method

This cloning method has two options: Whether to erase the target volume prior to cloning, and whether to require a block-level clone. The option to erase the target volume prior to cloning is important to consider when your goal is to create a bootable clone -- read the gray box at the bottom to understand how this option affects your clone. The option to "Require a block-level clone" will affect the performance of the clone, and is only available in certain circumstances. The performance difference and the circumstances will be explained in the next section.

While a block-level clone is rarely required to insure the fidelity of your backup, some people find comfort in the fact that, block-for-block, the resulting target is precisely like the original (this is simply impossible with a file-level clone). When possible, CCC will always prefer a block-level clone. However, don't lose sleep if meeting the requirements for a block-level clone is untenable for your particular backup or cloning situation. The file-level backup engine in CCC has been tuned and honed to bring the best performance and fidelity possible among Mac OS X backup utilities.

Block-level copies vs. file-level copies

Cloning an entire hard drive to another drive can be achieved in two ways: 1) Copying every file individually from one volume to the other or 2) Copying the underlying blocks from one hard drive to the other. These two methods are called "file-level copying" and "block-level copying", respectively. While each method produces functionally the same result, block-level copies are almost always significantly faster than file-level copies, and are therefore the preferred method for disk to disk clones.

To benefit from a block-level copy, the following criteria must be met:

1. You must choose to erase the target volume during the clone.
2. You must be able to unmount both devices (there cannot be any open files on either drive and you cannot be booted from either drive). Do not actually unmount the drives prior to the clone.
3. The target drive must be at least as large as the source drive.

If any of these criteria are not met, CCC will automatically fall back to a file-level clone. A file-level clone will yield the same result -- a bootable clone (assuming you didn't merge two operating systems), but it will take a little longer.

Do I need to clone, or just backup?

Often people clone when all they really need is a backup. When you clone a volume, every file is copied, and this can take a fair amount of time. If you just recently backed up your entire drive, use the "Incremental backup of selected items" method to backup your data instead. That method copies only the items that have changed, thus your backup is much faster. If you're moving to a new hard drive, cloning your machine prior to repair, etc. then the cloning method is the right choice for you.

Bootability verification

CCC determines whether your target volume will be bootable and indicates this beneath the "Cloning Options" section. To qualify as "bootable", the following requirements must be met:

• The target volume cannot be a disk image -- you cannot boot your Macintosh from a disk image.
• The source and target volumes must be local volumes -- CCC cannot determine the bootability of a remote volume.
• If the Macintosh is a PowerPC Macintosh, the target device must be an internal volume or on a Firewire hard drive. Intel Macintoshes can boot from either an internal volume, a Firewire hard drive, or a USB hard drive.
• The files and folders required by Mac OS X must be present of the source volume. These include: /Library, /System, /Users, /bin, /etc, /mach_kernel, /private, /sbin, /tmp, /usr, and /var.
• The files and folders that are required by Mac OS X must be selected to be copied to the target volume (applicable only to the "Incremental backup of selected items" cloning method).

What else can I do with the "Fast, simple backup of everything" method?

In addition to cloning one volume to another, CCC also allows you to clone a volume to a disk image.

Learn more about cloning to disk image

How do I restore files backed up using the "Fast, simple backup of everything" method?

If you need to restore just a file or handful of files, simply browse the backup drive in the Finder and copy those items back to your original drive to restore them. If you need to restore a larger subset of files, but not the entire volume, click here to learn how to restore files with the "Copy selected files" option.

To restore an entire volume, for example your boot volume after a disk failure, you will need to boot from an external firewire hard drive. Ideally, you will simply boot from the firewire hard drive that you backed up to using CCC. Launch CCC, select the drive that you backed up to as the source, select your original (or replacement) drive as the target, choose to "Fast, simple backup of everything", then clone. If the target drive must be bootable, you must use the "Erase the target drive" option (see below for the explanation).

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