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There is one big gotcha with APFS volumes. Many disk repair utilities have problems with APFS volumes, such as Disk Warrior or Techtool Pro. They cannot rebuild a corrupted volume. The fewer APFS backup disks you have, the greater the risk that you can lose data. Lost a TM disk just this last week due to a hardware failure, but had 3 other TM backups available so I was OK.
There was one big gotcha with HFS+ volumes. Not very robust so disk repair tools were sometimes needed.
 
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There is one big gotcha with APFS volumes. Many disk repair utilities have problems with APFS volumes, such as Disk Warrior or Techtool Pro. They cannot rebuild a corrupted volume. The fewer APFS backup disks you have, the greater the risk that you can lose data. Lost a TM disk just this last week due to a hardware failure, but had 3 other TM backups available so I was OK.

Yes it is certainly true that Diskwarrior, Techtool Pro and Drive Genius cannot perform a Disk Directory rebuild on APFS because Apple has not released the necessary info. TTP and DG use fsck, the same as Disk Utility First Aid which is the only APFS directory checking tool available, and free!

OTOH one of the big benefits of APFS is that it is less likely to get corrupted.

Is there a typo in your sentence "The fewer APFS backup disks you have, the greater the risk that you can lose data" ? Did you mean the more APFS backup disks the greater the risk?

Are you saying that your TM disk that had a hardware failure last week was APFS, and if it had been HFS you could have recovered the data from it with DiskWarrior during its death throes ? Possibly, but my experience was that Diskwarrior et al were not useful for proper hardware failures. They were more useful for repairing the Directory structure of physically healthy disks which had some corruption of directory. Proper hardware failures is one of the main reasons for backups.

BTW on the subject of APFS and HDDs I have been having an interesting discussion about speed in this thread. Bottom line I see exactly same speed of HDD backup to HFS and APFS. Doing some more tests to try and discover why it is widely believed APFS on HDD is slower.
 
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Yes it is certainly true that Diskwarrior, Techtool Pro and Drive Genius cannot perform a Disk Directory rebuild on APFS because Apple has not released the necessary info. TTP and DG use fsck, the same as Disk Utility First Aid which is the only APFS directory checking tool available, and free!

OTOH one of the big benefits of APFS is that it is less likely to get corrupted.

Is there a typo in your sentence "The fewer APFS backup disks you have, the greater the risk that you can lose data" ? Did you mean the more APFS backup disks the greater the risk?

Are you saying that your TM disk that had a hardware failure last week was APFS, and if it had been HFS you could have recovered the data from it with DiskWarrior during its death throes ? Possibly, but my experience was that Diskwarrior et al were not useful for proper hardware failures. They were more useful for repairing the Directory structure of physically healthy disks which had some corruption of directory. Proper hardware failures is one of the main reasons for backups.

BTW on the subject of APFS and HDDs I have been having an interesting discussion about speed in this thread. Bottom line I see exactly same speed of HDD backup to HFS and APFS. Doing some more tests to try and discover why it is widely believed APFS on HDD is slower.
Some remarks:
- APFS never failed me, even after crashes and power drops,
- HPFS needed some extra repairs, sometimes,
- if someone is dissatisfied with the storage inside ones Mac,
then realise that MANY complaints in these fora originate from replacements or other 'improvements':
better leave the Mac alone.
;JOOP!
 
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Is there a typo in your sentence

Thanks. Fixed.

Are you saying that your TM disk that had a hardware failure last week was APFS, and if it had been HFS you could have recovered the data from it with DiskWarrior during its death throes ?

No. I was just pointing out that disks do fail. It was APFS, but would have had the same result if it was HFS+. I have had a lot more problems with APFS disks than HFS+ ones, maybe due to problems I have/had with Softraid. If there is a problem I want to have the option of fixing it. All 3 of the tools which I have used in the past no longer work.
 
I wonder what made that high speed possible?

Quick Update: Leveraging FSEvents for super quick updates to the destination

Did you know that macOS keeps track of changes to folders? CCC 6's Quick Update taps into this service (called "FSEvents") and the result is lightning quick updates to your backups - no exhaustive scanning for changes required. When Quick Update is enabled for a task, CCC will ask the FSEvents service for a list of folders modified on the source since the last backup rather than scanning every folder for changes. The performance benefit of this feature cannot be understated, we've seen up to 20X improvement to backup time, especially for tasks involving a destination network volume.

This here ^. When I turned on the Quick Update option on CCC6 I noticed a big difference in backup speeds.
 



This here ^. When I turned on the Quick Update option on CCC6 I noticed a big difference in backup speeds.
Thanks for sharing this invaluable information:
I never knew the use of fsevents[] and erased it now and then on USB volumes.
I now understand that one should leave it alone on any backup source volume.
(and I do never fiddle with backup targets).
;JOOP!
 
Carbon Copy Cloner 6.0.2-b3 available if you have beta downloads enabled.
  • Changed
    b3: When thinning snapshots, CCC now indicates the name of the snapshot using the user's preferred date format.
  • Changed
    b3: The "Files evaluated" statistic is now updated appropriately during a Preview run.
  • Changed
    b3: Addressed a case where CCC would abort the backup task, indicating that a subtask had timed out, in cases where the destination was particularly slow to deliver information about a folder that had an exceptionally high file count (e.g. tens of thousands, or millions).
  • Changed
    b3: File and folder name changes that only affect the case of characters in the string are now detected (i.e. when that is the only change to the source file) and applied to the destination.
 
Carbon Copy Cloner 6.0.2 is now available.
  • Changed
    By default, CCC will process up to four folders simultaneously and copy up to eight files simultaneously. This update reduces simultaneous folder handling to two if CCC cannot verify that both the source and destination are Solid State devices. We have also exposed a setting that allows the user to adjust this value manually in Advanced Settings > Performance & Analysis, including an option that configures the task to use the CCC v5 legacy file copier instead of the new file copier.
  • Changed
    Addressed a case where CCC would abort the backup task, indicating that a subtask had timed out, in cases where the destination was particularly slow to deliver information about a folder that had an exceptionally high file count (e.g. tens of thousands, or millions).
  • Fixed
    Fixed a math issue that was previously causing inflight snapshot or SafetyNet archive removal to not remove enough snapshots or archives in cases where the destination was very full.
  • Changed
    Fixed a scheduling issue that was causing "When files are modified on the source" tasks to not resume monitoring when the task was back within a user-specified time limit.
  • Changed
    "Next run date" in the CCC Dashboard now correctly rolls over from "tomorrow" to "today" when the date changes.
  • Fixed
    Addressed a handful of crashers and exceptions.
  • Changed
    When thinning snapshots, CCC now indicates the name of the snapshot using the user's preferred date format.
  • Changed
    The "Files evaluated" statistic is now updated appropriately during a Preview run.
  • Changed
    File and folder name changes that only affect the case of characters in the string are now detected (i.e. when that is the only change to the source file) and applied to the destination.
  • Changed
    CCC will no longer preserve system-immutable file flags when restoring items to the startup disk. This was leading to the creation of a folder (typically "Users") that couldn't be removed by the Finder.
  • Changed
    CCC now properly imposes a High Sierra+ requirement for the Remote Macintosh feature.
  • Changed
    Fixed the tooltip on the Source selector when a Big Sur startup volume is selected. Technically that volume is not mounted, but pointing this out is not really necessary.
  • New
    Added color pickers for the lines on the Dynamic Performance Chart.
  • Changed
    Improved the handling of moved folders in the Quick Update feature. Technically these don't cause modifications to files, but nonetheless we should apply these changes when the task runs.
  • Fixed
    Fixed an errant case-conflict error that can occur on Case Sensitive APFS destination volumes when a folder name has a non-normalized Unicode character.
  • Fixed
    Corrected the behavior of the "Remove excluded files" setting in the Task Filter window. Folders were only getting removed when explicitly excluded via a custom rule (not when unchecked in the main table), and files that were only implicitly excluded (i.e. via the default filter behavior) were getting removed. While that matched CCC v5 behavior, it was not the more conservative result that we were aiming for.
  • Changed
    When creating a read-only disk image, CCC now uses sparsebundle as the default format for the intermediate read-write disk image. Big Sur, in particular, seems reluctant to create sparseimage files, especially on NAS volumes.
  • Fixed
    Fixed a timing issue that led to errors when running a "When files are changed on the source" task soon after startup.
  • Changed
    Addressed an edge case in which a source NAS device may lie about the nature of a symlink (i.e. initially the NAS reports that it is a regular file), leading to errors.
  • Changed
    Corrected the presentation of the startup disk's custom Snapshot Retention Policy.
 
^^^^Yes you did. And you posted instructions on how to make a bootable clone. So I'll THANK YOU again👍

Lou
 
I am new to CCC in general (version 6) so pardon my question:
Can I clone an internal 1TB SSD onto and external 480GB SSD AND exclude files ( specifically iPhone backup)? The external is APFS GUID… I want a bootable backup…

Even including the iPhone backup I am well below the 480 but that’s only a question of time…
During my upgrade to Big Sur I cloned the internal to a 1TB external with CCC5 no problem…
 
I am new to CCC in general (version 6) so pardon my question:
Can I clone an internal 1TB SSD onto and external 480GB SSD AND exclude files ( specifically iPhone backup)? The external is APFS GUID… I want a bootable backup…

Even including the iPhone backup I am well below the 480 but that’s only a question of time…
During my upgrade to Big Sur I cloned the internal to a 1TB external with CCC5 no problem…
You already gave the answer: if there is space it will work, although I would leave some 10% open.
If you already know that you will need more space in the future, save your money for a bigger target disk.
That doesn't have to be an SSD disk; an USB rotating disk is cheap and good for this job.
;JOOP!
 
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You already gave the answer: if there is space it will work, although I would leave some 10% open.
If you already know that you will need more space in the future, save your money for a bigger target disk.
That doesn't have to be an SSD disk; an USB rotating disk is cheap and good for this job.
;JOOP!
Thanks, yea, I just have this 480 drive and it should last me for another year or so ...
without the iPhone backup my internal holds ~ 300GB, even with the iPhone backup it's ~ 430GB, so ...

When I tried CCC5 I remember there was a "clone" button, in CCC6 it said "start", maybe I need to check all the boxes again and ee what I missed
 
Thanks, yea, I just have this 480 drive and it should last me for another year or so ...
without the iPhone backup my internal holds ~ 300GB, even with the iPhone backup it's ~ 430GB, so ...

When I tried CCC5 I remember there was a "clone" button, in CCC6 it said "start", maybe I need to check all the boxes again and ee what I missed
turns out that my initial plan does NOT work ... from CCC Helper below ... back to drawing board

Can I exclude some content from the initial backup?​

If your Mac is running Big Sur, then it is not possible to exclude content and produce a bootable backup. If you must exclude content from the initial backup, then we recommend that you proceed with a Standard Backup. If you would like to make that backup bootable afterwards, then you can install macOS onto the backup volume.
 
turns out that my initial plan does NOT work ... from CCC Helper below ... back to drawing board
There is sort of a workaround. You are correct that first clone mirrors the whole drive, but you can set subsequent syncs to only sync what you want and to remove data from the target that is not part of the sync settings.

So the initial clone would copy the iPhone backups over, but they would be removed at the first sync if you set it up that way.
 
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Carbon Copy Cloner 6.0.3-b1 available if you have beta downloads enabled.
  • Changed
    Resolved a case where CCC was stripping the destination volume's custom icon in a folder-to-volume task configuration.
  • Changed
    The search field in the Task History window Audit tab now yields results that match folder names as well as file names. in the sidebar for a task or group. When the "group completed" icon is dismissed, that state is now recalled across launches of CCC.
  • Fixed
    Resolved a condition in which the "Maintain a record of transactions" checkbox became practically uncheck-able in CCC 6.0.2.
  • New
    Added a new "Last Successful Run" token for the email notification template.
  • Fixed
    Improved the handling of cases where a source NAS presents a symlink as an ordinary file. Fixed an accounting issue that led to unusually high "data copied" values in those cases.
  • New
    Added a Start button to the "Upcoming Group and Task Events" view for task groups.
  • Changed
    Updated how APFS volume disk usage is calculated on macOS Monterey.
  • Fixed
    Fixed an issue in which CCC was unable to replace a folder on the destination with a symbolic link (i.e. because a folder on the source had been replaced by a symbolic link). This issue only affected macOS Catalina users.
  • Changed
    Eliminated some spurious "updated attributes" transactions that were getting created when backing up to a NAS volume.
  • Changed
    Resolved a conflict between the "Remove excluded items" setting and custom protection rules. Custom protection rules now have precedence over the "Remove excluded items" setting.
 
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Carbon Copy Cloner 6.0.3-b1 available if you have beta downloads enabled.

Just a thought - perhaps we should ask the moderators to merge the 2 "Carbon Copy Cloner" threads (Big Sur and Monterey) into the Apps forum and that way it would include all versions? ie Mojave, Catalina, Big Sur and Monterey?

I regret that I did not start this thread in the Apps forum and now the Monterey thread is surely going to be more popular going forward - but both leave out the Mojave and Catalia questions and comments?

It might make sense to have one "APP" thread for all CCC versions and all macOS versions?
 
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