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Why I now prefer SuperDuper over Carbon Copy Cloner.

M

manny88

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 31, 2016
65
30
So in the past when I had a MacBook Pro 2016 with two usb-c ports this wouldn't have been a problem. The problem being now is I sold that MacBook Pro to my brother, and only recently got a MacBook 2017, which has 1 port.

Now when I tried to CCC my drive to my backup drive via battery, my power would die before the backup would complete.

Then I bought a 3rd party imitation HDMI/USB/Power dongle from curry's in the UK for £30 so I could power and backup to my external Sandisk SSD (it came with an adapter to change usb-c to USB so I could use it in this dongle).

So I'd leave the backup running, a full fresh one, next day when I would wake up, the backup supposedly completed successfully after 16 hours. However I couldn't really trust CCC saying this because the dongle seems to break after 16 hours of continuous use, because both drives would be ejected and the MacBook would no longer be charging. I'd have to restart my MacBook for the dongle to work again. So I attempted CCC again, and CCC completed the task at around the 16 hour mark, but the drives were ejected and wasn't charging again. So did CCC actually finish the task 16 hours both times, or did it say task complete because the dongle seems to fail around 16 hours and just ejected the drive? I couldn't be sure and didn't want to risk it, and I didn't want to shell out £70 for the official apple dongle just in case it made no difference. The dongle works again as long as I restart the MacBook.

So today I give SuperDuper a go for the first time. Using the same dongle with my power and external hard drive connected through it. I left it on and went off to the supermarket.

I check my MacBook now, backup has been completed in 49 minutes 11 seconds!

Woop, what a difference! If I was using SuperDuper first I wouldn't have even bothered spending £30 on a dongle, I would have just charged it up first and then plugged in my usb-c sandisk drive and let it backup on battery power.

So I'm a SuperDuper fan now, CCC is now in the trash, because the speed difference is insane.

I'm not associated with either companies/products, this is just my recent story with both softwares, and I'm on the latest Mojave OS.
 
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I prefer SuperDuper for the simple reason that you get basic functionality for free (or at least the last time I used it it was free.) Of course, differential backups require the Pro version. CCC used to be great, but I guess the shareware model didn't work out for Bombich.

I can't explain the speed difference at all. I seem to recall them working at about the same speed over Firewire 800. Obviously, USB-C is a whole different ball game.
 
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+1 for superduper.
Have the registered version, so I can do smart backup clones, just updating what’s changed.
 
I have the Paid version of CCC - not sure if there is a difference / or what the differences are vs the free version - but there must be ?

Never had a back up that took longer that 1 hour with CCC - usually a "from scratch" type back up - most are a matter of minutes

Have the Catalina update installed and have had no issues on Catalina with CCC
 
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Usually with the paid versions you can schedule backups, and do incremental backups/clones without having to do a full copy.
 
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For backing up my external drives, I use SuperDuper. But for my bootable clone, I use Carbon Copy Cloner. It's the most reliable choice and I've been using it for years (and I appreciate the academic discount).
 
Been using SuperDuper! reliably for years, and it has always performed as advertised. Takes less time now that I have SSDs both inside the machine it is cloning/copying from, and to the external device it is writing to. And this is via USB 3.1.

Also SuperDuper! has not been updated for Catalina. A beta was released the other day (here is the thread I started about that: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/superduper-beta-catalina-compatibility-available.2206653/). I would strongly suggest you read the part that discusses current short comings with this beta. I personally will not use the beta.
 
I've been using SuperDuper for all my cloning needs for well over 10 years. Love it, but still waiting to switch to Catalina. I'll wait until the .3 version brfore installing on my main machine, but will put it on an external drive for testing a little sooner. SuperDuper makes it easy.
 
+1000! Again, very, very accurate statements. And smart, wise move about waiting until a later version of Catalina is released. For myself, a Catalina version of Onyx was released today, and I suspect one for SuperDuper! will be released "somewhat" shortly. But I am waiting for the update to TechTool Pro for Catalina compatibility. That will take longer, and based on what happened last year with TTPro and Mojave, that Catalina update could be "delayed" until after OS 10.15.2 is released, but before V10.15.3.
 
manny88 said:
So in the past when I had a MacBook Pro 2016 with two usb-c ports this wouldn't have been a problem. The problem being now is I sold that MacBook Pro to my brother, and only recently got a MacBook 2017, which has 1 port.

Now when I tried to CCC my drive to my backup drive via battery, my power would die before the backup would complete.

Then I bought a 3rd party imitation HDMI/USB/Power dongle from curry's in the UK for £30 so I could power and backup to my external Sandisk SSD (it came with an adapter to change usb-c to USB so I could use it in this dongle).

So I'd leave the backup running, a full fresh one, next day when I would wake up, the backup supposedly completed successfully after 16 hours. However I couldn't really trust CCC saying this because the dongle seems to break after 16 hours of continuous use, because both drives would be ejected and the MacBook would no longer be charging. I'd have to restart my MacBook for the dongle to work again. So I attempted CCC again, and CCC completed the task at around the 16 hour mark, but the drives were ejected and wasn't charging again. So did CCC actually finish the task 16 hours both times, or did it say task complete because the dongle seems to fail around 16 hours and just ejected the drive? I couldn't be sure and didn't want to risk it, and I didn't want to shell out £70 for the official apple dongle just in case it made no difference. The dongle works again as long as I restart the MacBook.

So today I give SuperDuper a go for the first time. Using the same dongle with my power and external hard drive connected through it. I left it on and went off to the supermarket.

I check my MacBook now, backup has been completed in 49 minutes 11 seconds!

Woop, what a difference! If I was using SuperDuper first I wouldn't have even bothered spending £30 on a dongle, I would have just charged it up first and then plugged in my usb-c sandisk drive and let it backup on battery power.

So I'm a SuperDuper fan now, CCC is now in the trash, because the speed difference is insane.

I'm not associated with either companies/products, this is just my recent story with both softwares, and I'm on the latest Mojave OS.
Click to expand...

Something doesn’t sound right there. It shouldn’t take 16 hours to backup SSD to SSD via USB-C.
 
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steve23094 said:
Something doesn’t sound right there. It shouldn’t take 16 hours to backup SSD to SSD via USB-C.
Click to expand...

Agree 100%! I use a USB 3.1 connection for each of my machines, to separate external SSDs. The SuperDuper! backup for my late 2012 MacMini takes less than 20 minutes, and for my mid 2017 MacBook Air, between 25 and 30 minutes, at most. And both of my Macs have SSDs.
 
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Second Beta of SuperDuper! for Catalina compatibility available:


Sounds encouraging, but I am still going to wait. As it is, when Shirt Pocket releases a new version, it is (typically) still compatible with at least the prior version of the Mac OS, and in most instances, with a number of prior versions of the Mac OS.

I am betting that I will be able to use V3.3 with Mojave. But until TechTool Pro has a Catalina-compatible version available, I will stick with Mojave.
 
steve23094 said:
Something doesn’t sound right there. It shouldn’t take 16 hours to backup SSD to SSD via USB-C.
Click to expand...

No it shouldn’t. I didn’t understand it either, and I made sure everything that would slow the copy was disabled.

Don’t know whether it was a bug or something, because if super duper did it in 49 minutes, something was obviously going wrong with CCC.

Regardless that’s what happened to me and I shared my experience. If people are happy with CCC they should stick with it. But I couldn’t continue wasting my time trying to figure it out, or continue to stress my MacBook for 16 hours at a time, so I gave the alternative software people are always talking about a try, and it worked without a hitch.

Like I said I’m not associated with either companies or softwares, this is just my recent experience (this week), and I wanted to share it.
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honestone33 said:
Agree 100%! I use a USB 3.1 connection for each of my machines, to separate external SSDs. The SuperDuper! backup for my late 2012 MacMini takes less than 20 minutes, and for my mid 2017 MacBook Air, between 25 and 30 minutes, at most. And both of my Macs have SSDs.
Click to expand...

I’m not sure you read the original message as you’re super duper as your example . I only had a problem when trying to backup with CCC (16 hours), super duper did a complete clone on the same external ssd drive in 49 minutes.
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btw I forgot to mention the clone size of my hard drive was 140gb. So 49mins to clone 140gb.
 
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I own Super Duper and have owned Carbon Copy Cloner too, but I now prefer ChronoSync for tasks I once did with those programs. Does bootable clones and much much more, even file synching to iOS. Free upgrades forever too. If shopping around consider it as well.
 
manny88 said:
I’m not sure you read the original message as you’re super duper as your example . I only had a problem when trying to backup with CCC (16 hours), super duper did a complete clone on the same external ssd drive in 49 minutes.
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btw I forgot to mention the clone size of my hard drive was 140gb. So 49mins to clone 140gb.
Click to expand...

Oops! Did not read that closely enough. Thanks!

The size of my backups are around 80 Gig, but 49 minutes to clone 140 gig (50% larger than mine) is more than twice as long as mine takes. Maybe the specs, being different on your MacBook 2017 versus my MacBook Air 2017, make a difference. Yet you are doing your backups via a USB-C port on your Mac (what about the connector on the external enclosure), whereas my backups (for both of my Macs) are via a USB 3.1 port, and the external case is also USB 3.1.

Possibly another difference (maybe not too much, though) is that except for my MacBook Air, all my SSDs (including the one inside my Mac Mini) are Samsung Pro SSDs (840 Pro inside the Mini, and 850 Pros for both external ones).
 
The Hammer said:
I'll be following this thread as I am interested in this software ( SuperDuper).
Click to expand...

Cool! It's a very good product, as is Carbon Copy Cloner (never used it, but have read numerous positive reviews, comments, etc. about it).

Remember folks, SuperDuper! does not backup the (hidden) Recovery partition, whereas Carbon Copy Cloner can/does. Not an issue for me, but maybe it is for others.
 
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rpmurray said:
I'm surprised you didn't contact Bombich about the problem before throwing CCC under the bus. CCC has great customer support and I'm sure if he had a look at the logs he could have told you exactly why it was so slow.
Click to expand...

Exactly! I actually wonder why it takes longer for SuperDuper! to backup my MacBook Air than my Mac Mini. The space used on the Air is actually a little less than on the Mini. But I suspect it has to do with 1) processor speed, and 2) processor type.

I know that before I do my backups, I run Onyx and TechTool Pro to do some more cleanup and maintenance. This is in addition to my daily cleanup efforts.
 
honestone33 said:
Cool! It's a very good product, as is Carbon Copy Cloner (never used it, but have read numerous positive reviews, comments, etc. about it).

Remember folks, SuperDuper! does not backup the (hidden) Recovery partition, whereas Carbon Copy Cloner can/does. Not an issue for me, but maybe it is for others.
Click to expand...
I believe that I have recently read on the shirt pocket site that it does now clone the recovery partition. Something about APFS Recovery volume support.
 
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The Hammer said:
I believe that I have recently read on the shirt pocket site that it does now clone the recovery partition. Something about APFS Recovery volume support.
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That does not seem to be the case. Here is the link for the Shirt Pocket site:


I did a search of APFS, and only 1 "hit", but nothing about the recovery partition.

Next, here is the link for SuperDuper!:


Doing a search for APFS does reveal this one statement:

"APFS recovery volume support"

But that does not have anything to do with the (hidden) Recovery HD partition created by a clean, fresh. "virgin" installation of the Mac OS. What it means is that one can do a recovery/restore with SuperDuper!, from an APFS formatted device/partition.
 
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