USB, Firewire, Thunderbolt?
Many hard drive enclosures have Firewire, USB, Thunderbolt or a combination of interfaces for connecting the hard drive to your computer. Any of these interfaces will work fine for backing up and safeguarding your data. We generally recommend purchasing an enclosure that offers multiple interface options (e.g. Firewire+USB or Thunderbolt+USB). If your Mac does not offer native USB 3.0 support (e.g. it's older than 2012), a USB device may boot your Mac, but performance will be considerably slower than your Mac's internal hard drive.
Catalina users: Apple no longer supports booting a Mac from a FireWire-attached device. Backing up to a FireWire device is fine, but if you need a bootable backup, you should use a device that can be attached to your Mac via USB or Thunderbolt.
Specific hard drive recommendations
Most hard drive enclosures will work just fine for your backups, however, some cannot function as a bootable device. It would be nearly impossible for us to curate an exhaustive list of every enclosure/Mac combination that does and does not work. However, we frequently get asked for a recommendation, so here's a list of some hard drive enclosures that we have tested with good results. Performance and price go hand-in-hand. If you opt for a USB-only device, pre-2015 Macs will be slower when booting from that device. USB-C equipped Macs can work well from a USB-C (USB 3.1) equipped hard drive, especially if the disk inside of the enclosure is an SSD.
Then, once your Mac is fully loaded, run Carbon Copy Cloner and choose your settings carefully. 'Source Disk' should now be your CCC backup and 'Target Disk' will be your Mac's main hard-drive. Go through the warnings again and read the text beneath “What is going to happen?” again. Download Carbon Copy Cloner for Mac OS X Free. The simplest way to backup all your data. It is one of the best backup solutions for Mac. It is automatically backups our data by scheduling basic. Mac Backup Software. Restore files you accidentally deleted, or turn back the clock on your whole computer. I’d like to take this opportunity to say I’ve been extremely happy with Carbon Copy Cloner and Bombich Software over the four years I’ve been a customer. CCC is a truly outstanding piece of crafted software with top.
USB 3.1 Gen 2 Portable External SSD
These devices offer a moderate amount of storage and excellent performance. This is our top pick for a bootable backup device:
Oyen Digital U32 Shadow External SSD USB-C (1-4TB) (UK)
Oyen Digital MiniPro Dura USB-C (USB 3.1) Rugged (1-4TB)
Oyen Digital MiniPro Dura USB-C (USB 3.1) Rugged (1-4TB)
An improvement to CCC in version 3 is in how you choose to perform an incremental clone—in other words, to update an existing clone backup to reflect recent changes to your Mac’s hard drive. Download Carbon Copy Cloner, a tool that can clone your hard disk from Mac OS X. Cloning is making an exact, bootable copy of your main hard disk, onto a separate hard disk or hard disk partition. This is incredibly useful for Hackintoshes; if your original OS X installation explodes while upgrading, you'll still be able to boot from your clone, and you won't end up having to reinstall your.
USB 3.1, Desktop External Hard Drive (mechanical drive)
Thunderbolt, Desktop External Hard Drive Enclosure (without a disk)
HighPoint RocketStor RS5212 Thunderbolt Storage Dock
Oyen Novus External USB-C Rugged Desktop Hard Drive Enclosure
Oyen Novus External USB-C Rugged Desktop Hard Drive Enclosure
USB 3.1, External Enclosure (without a disk)
Bare mechanical drive (SATA) 500GB - 6 TB
These drives are 'bare' and will need an enclosure or dock to be used externally
Not Recommended
Before purchasing any enclosure, be sure to check whether any known compatibility issues pertain to that device. We offer some general advice here, though, and a small collection of specific devices that are very popular, but known to not serve well as bootable backup disks for macOS.
Avoid disks that use Shingled Magnetic Recording
Several years ago Seagate introduced Shingled Magnetic Recording to increase the storage capacity of rotational hard drives, but at the expense of writing performance. We anticipate considerably worse performance for APFS in particular on these devices. Many vendors have not been particularly forthright about the use of SMR in their devices until recently. Some devices that leverage SMR include:
5400RPM Rotational HDDs, aka 'Slim', 'Portable' or 2.5' hard drives:
These disks are cheap and can be acquired by the palette at your local Costco. Unfortunately, APFS is not tuned to perform well on rotational disks, and that performance is just unacceptable on these 'slowest of the slow' rotational disks. The following disks are examples of these slower devices, and we do not recommend using these for macOS bootable backups:
- Seagate Backup Plus Slim Portable Drive
- Western Digital My Passport Ultra Portable
- LaCie Mobile Drive
- G-Technology G-DRIVE Mobile USB 3.0 Portable External Hard Drive
If you have one of these devices you can format the device with Apple's legacy 'Mac OS Extended, Journaled' format instead of APFS, and use it for drives and SD cards:
Despite being based on flash storage, which you'd think would be faster than rotational storage, USB thumb drives and SD cards are often quite slow. We don't recommend using these devices for backing up any substantive amount of data, and definitely not for creating a bootable backup of your startup disk.
Western Digital My Passport HDD
We have received several reports that some Macs are unable to boot macOS Catalina from a Western Digital My Passport enclosure.
How big should the backup volume be?
The backup volume should be at least as large as the amount of data that you want to copy to it. If you're planning to make regular backups to this volume, a good rule of thumb is that the backup volume should be at least 50% larger than the amount of data that you're initially backing up to it. This allows for a modest amount of data growth and room for temporary archiving of modified and deleted files.
We strongly recommend that you find the means to dedicate a volume to the task of backing up your irreplaceable data.
If you have data on your backup volume that exists nowhere else, it is not backed up! Whenever you target a volume for use with Carbon Copy Cloner, there is a risk that some files will be removed for one legitimate reason or another. CCC offers options and warnings to protect your data from loss, but nothing can protect your data from a misuse of CCC or a misunderstanding of the functionality that it provides.
Backing up to Network Attached Storage (NAS)
NAS devices are very trendy these days; many people find the convenience of a wireless backup to be alluring. Based on user feedback, however, we discourage people from relying on NAS devices for their primary backup for several reasons:
Ccc Backup Mac Os
- Write performance to a NAS device is typically, at best, comparable to writing to a USB 2.0 HDD
- Performance of a NAS accessed via WiFi can be 10-100 times slower than the average locally-attached hard drive
- Periodically validating the integrity of data on a NAS device may be impractical due to network performance.
- WiFi backups are only as reliable as the network connection and macOS's network filesystem client
- Filesystem transactions on a network filesystem incur a lot more overhead than filesystem transactions on a locally-attached filesystem, leading to very long backup windows when your data set has lots of files (e.g. > 250K files)
- Disk image files can eventually become corrupted if frequent network connectivity loss occurs while they are mounted, or when free space on the underlying NAS volume becomes constrained. If you've seen a recommendation from Time Machine to delete and recreate the backup on a network volume, that's the same underlying issue, and we'd make the same suggestion if the disk image can't be mounted.
For primary backups, we recommend that you procure a USB or Thunderbolt hard drive and create a bootable backup on that locally-attached disk.Local, bootable backups are much simpler and more reliable, and a lot easier to restore from should your Mac's startup disk fail. The logistics of restoring the operating system from a disk image on a network volume are pretty complicated if you don't have a functional startup disk. Providing that functional startup disk is the primary appeal of the CCC backup solution.
NAS devices that we specifically do not recommend
Dropdmg 3 5 7. Western Digital MyCloud Home: The 'Home' model of this NAS device requires the use of WD-proprietary software to access the storage securely; direct access to the storage via SMB is only available with Guest privileges. Users report that performance of the storage while using WD's software is subpar in comparison to Guest access via SMB, and other users have reported to us that macOS is unable to create or mount disk images on the storage when mounted via Western Digital's software.
Because CCC backups are non-proprietary copies of your original volume, you can navigate the contents of your CCC backup volume in the Finder and find your files exactly where you would find them on the original source volume. If you need to restore a single file, you can copy it directly from your backup volume in the Finder. CCC is not required to gain access to your data. If you have a larger restore need, though, CCC is ready to help make the restore process as easy as it was to back up in the first place.
Restoring non-system files
The restore process is virtually identical to the backup process. The notable differences are that you will probably be restoring a smaller subset of files than what you backed up, and that you may want to indicate that files newer on the original volume shouldn't be overwritten by potentially older versions on your backup. CCC offers a preset to make restoring files safe and easy.
- Launch CCC
- Select your backup volume from the source menu
- Select your original source volume from the destination menu
- Deselect any items from the list of items to be copied that you do not want to be restored
- Choose 'Preserve newer files, don't delete anything' from the preconfigured settings popup menu
- Click the Clone button
With the 'Preserve newer files, don't delete anything' preset, CCC will not overwrite a file that is newer on the original volume than the one that exists on the backup volume. Any items that are replaced will be archived as a safety precaution. Additionally, CCC will only restore the items that are missing from the original volume.
Note: If you choose your startup disk as the destination volume, CCC will impose a protective filter on system files and folders. It wouldn't be a good idea to overwrite or delete system files on the OS that you're booted from, so this isn't something that CCC will allow. If you need to restore system items or items in the Applications folder, refer to the following restore solution.
Restoring an entire volume (including system files)
To restore an entire volume that includes an installation of OS X, for example your boot volume after a disk failure, you will need to boot from an external Firewire or USB hard drive. Ideally, you will simply boot from the hard drive that you backed up to using CCC:
- Attach your CCC backup disk to your Mac
- Open the Startup Disk preference pane in the System Preferences application
- Choose your backup volume as the startup disk, then click on the Restart button
- If you are unable to boot from your original hard drive, hold down the Option key as you start up your Mac. Your backup disk should appear as a startup disk option in the startup disk selector screen.
- If you are replacing your original startup disk with a new hard drive, be sure to initialize that hard drive so it's ready to host an installation of OS X: Formatting and partitioning a hard drive
- Launch CCC
- Select your backup volume from the source menu
- Select your original source volume from the destination menu
- Choose 'Temporarily archive modified and deleted items' from the preconfigured settings popup menu.
- Click the Clone button
When the restore process has completed, reset your startup disk in the System Preferences application and restart your Mac.
Restoring from a folder
![Ccc Backup Mac Ccc Backup Mac](https://www.applegazette.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/carbon-copy-cloner-create-bootable-clone-macos-install-2.png)
If you chose a folder as your destination when you originally backed up your data, CCC can restore that data to the original location using the following steps:
- Select 'Choose a folder..' from CCC's Source menu and locate the folder that you had previously specified as your backup destination
- Select your original source volume from the destination menu. If you had specified a folder in the source menu when you originally backed up your data, select 'Choose a folder..' from CCC's Destination menu and locate that same folder.
- Choose 'Temporarily archive modified and deleted items' from the preconfigured settings popup menu.
- Click the Clone button
'I have a full-volume backup in a folder or a disk image, but I don't have a bootable backup. How can I restore everything?'
CCC makes bootable backups specifically to avoid this kind of situation. When you have a bootable backup, you simply boot from that, then restore everything to a replacement disk or the original disk. One step, minimal time, couldn't be easier. Occasionally people get into this sticky situation though — I have a backup of everything in a disk image or in a folder on the backup volume, there's a clean installation of OS X on my replacement disk, now how do I get everything back to the way that it was before?
The first thing that you need to do is make a boot volume that is not the volume you want to restore to. Once you have done that, you can boot from that volume and then do a complete restore of your backup to the replacement disk. There are several options for how and where you create this other bootable volume. For example, you could install OS X onto a thumb drive, or you could use CCC to clone your clean installation of OS X to a thumb drive. You could also create a new partition on your replacement disk and clone the fresh installation of OS X to that. The steps below attempt to make very few assumptions about the resources you'll have in this scenario: a) You have a fresh installation of OS X on a hard drive and b) you have your backup in a folder or disk image on some other disk. Given those assumptions, here is how we recommend that you proceed:
Create a new partition on your replacement disk
- Open the Disk Utility application and click on the disk icon that represents your internal hard drive. Don't click on the 'Macintosh HD' icon, click on the one above that.
- Click on the Partition tab.
- Click on the '+' button.
- Set the size of the new partition to 15GB and name it something like 'Rescue'.
- Click the 'Apply' button.
Clone your fresh installation of OS X to the Rescue volume
- Open the Carbon Copy Cloner application.
- Choose your current startup disk as the source.
- Choose the Rescue volume as the destination.
- If you aren't working from a fresh installation of OS X, take a moment to exclude third-party applications from the list of items to be copied, as well as any large items in your home folder (e.g. /Users/yourname/Music).
- Click the Clone button.
Boot from the Rescue volume and restore your data to the replacement disk
- Open the Startup Disk Preference Pane, set the Rescue volume as the startup disk, then click on the Restart button.
- Once restarted from the Rescue volume, attach the backup volume to your Mac and open the Carbon Copy Cloner application.
- If your data is backed up in a folder, choose 'Choose a folder..' from the Source menu and select that folder as the source. Otherwise, choose 'Restore from a disk image.." and locate your backup disk image.
- Choose your 'Macintosh HD' volume as the destination.
- Choose 'Temporarily archive modified and deleted items' from the settings menu.
- Click the Clone button.
Reboot from your restored volume and clean up
- Open the Startup Disk Preference Pane, set the restored volume as the startup disk, then click on the Restart button.
- Open the Disk Utility application and click on the disk icon that represents your internal hard drive.
- Click on the Partition tab.
- Click on the Rescue volume, then click on the '-' button to delete that volume.
- Click the Apply button.
Ccc Backup Mac Hard Drive
![Backup Backup](https://thesweetsetup.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ccc-hero.png)
Ccc Os X Backup
Finally, make a new backup to the root of a locally-attached hard drive so you'll have a bootable backup from here forward.