Carbon Copy Cleaner is a system backup and restore tool. It allows you to backup your data to prevent data loss when one of your disks fail. Carbon Copy Cloner, or CCC, clones your entire disk, including your files and all the operating system information, including the booting sectors, so that you can easily restore it whenever something bad happens.
CCC supports incremental backups. This means that after your initial backup has been made, only those files that have changed since the last backup will be added to it. This saves you a lot of time and saves a lot of your system's resources. This feature also allows you to keep past versions of your files that have been changed, giving you the ability to restore them too if necessary.
Of course, disk cloning and incremental backups are no good if your system isn't backed up frequently and constantly. Thus, CCC includes an advanced scheduling system that makes sure that your system is always backed up and that you can restore it should something happen.
Personally, I like how intuitive the interface is and how unobtrusive the whole app is. It is a great replacement for Time Machine. I don't do backups, and I should. But I have only read good reviews for Carbon Copy Cloner. It sounds like it is worth a try.
v3.5 [Jul 21, 2012]
- Fixed an issue in which CCC was unable to save scheduled tasks after being updated.
- Resolved a permissions issue related to accessing some files on source when the destination was a network volume.
- Made some minor UI adjustments in the Documentation window.
- Fixed an intermittent exception at the end of a scheduled task that would result in the "Task finished" window disappearing early and failure of email notifications.
- Fixed an exception that would cause a hang during the creation of a Recovery HD volume.
- Non-admin users will no longer be prompted to authenticate when launching CCC on Lion or Mountain Lion. This authentication was leveraged to collect information about the Recovery HD volumes attached to your Mac, but CCC was unable to give that indication prior to the authentication dialog being presented. To avoid unnecessary concern, we chose to not collect that information when a user is logged in to a non-admin account.
- When LateNite Software's "Clusters" software makes changes to .DS_Store files on the source volume, those changes can lead to errors during the backup. These errors are now suppressed.
