Carbon Copy Cloner Review

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For 22 years, Bombich Software’s Carbon Copy Cloner has been one of the absolute go-to utilities for cloning data from one volume to another on the Mac. When the software first arrived in 2002, it was considered a bit tricky to use, but worth looking at. Over the decades, Carbon Copy Cloner’s feature set has grown, and it has become increasingly reliable in its core task: getting dead-on perfect copies of your files where they need to be.

The software retails for $49.99/£40.10 for a Personal and Household license (an upgrade license is up to 50% off). There’s also an easy-to-start, full-featured 30-day trial with no account needing to be created or credit or debit card sent along to the company to be charged later. If you like it and want to pay for it, it can always be bought later, a respectful hat tip to Bombich’s previous experience as a shareware company.

To begin, simply download Carbon Copy Cloner from Bombich, install it, assign it full permissions over your hard drives, and you’re set.

Carbon Copy Cloner 7.0.1 requires macOS 13 Ventura or later to install and run, supports the HFS+ and APFS drive formats, and can back up to local volumes as well as NAS-enabled volumes sitting on a network, but is unable to back up Windows file formats, to optical media such as CD-ROM or DVD-ROM, or to web-based platforms such as WebDAV, FTP, NFS, assorted cloud platforms, or Apple’s Time Machine platforms.

Carbon Copy Cloner doesn’t seek to be the Swiss Army knife of Mac cloning utilities and instead plays extremely well to its strengths. During testing, standard cloning went through without a hitch, and Bombich has outfitted newer versions of its software with a more comprehensive user interface, filters that can be customized so only necessary files are cloned, accessible use of Apple’s Snapshots technology, and easy access to an astounding array of configuration options, such as disk encryption, task notes, and bandwidth configuration for NAS backups.

Other tools, such as scheduling, performed without a hitch, and the task manager shone in its ability to save and configure multiple backup tasks. A cool scripting feature allows for custom scripts to be loaded and activated as needed for power users, and a handy quick view of each mounted volume shows useful information such as the protocol it’s using, drive technology, ownership settings, drive format, and encryption status. Carbon Copy Cloner’s SafetyNet feature can also be configured to allow for drive formatting or stop a process before it overwrites data on a volume, which is a good addition.

There are only a couple of weak points for Bombich to address with Carbon Copy Cloner 7.0.1, and one of them is due more to Apple’s lack of openness than a failing on Bombich’s part. Creating a boot drive in Carbon Copy Cloner is currently a hit-or-miss proposition, and test runs at creating a bootable external volume of my M2 Mac Studio’s solid-state drive met with what I initially thought was a victory that later failed. While the operating system was cloned over cleanly, Apple’s demand for verification of the operating system from the external volume prevented the unit from booting successfully. This is due to Apple’s current protocols, and in the past, it was far easier to create a bootable external drive that could readily serve as a backup boot partition for an Intel-based Mac. Bombich recommends the user work with the Legacy Bootable Copy Assistant option, but this is still up in the air until Apple and the developer community can find some common ground on this topic.

Finally, the initial price of the software is a bit of a sticking point, and while $24.99 hits the sweet spot for an upgrade, the initial asking price of $49.99 is higher than one might expect, even if the software more than pays off in the long run.

Should you buy Carbon Copy Cloner?

While Bombich’s current quibble with Apple over bootable drive creation is annoying, this isn’t a deal breaker and other utilities are facing the same issues with everyone’s favorite fruit company. That being said, Carbon Copy Cloner pairs off well with utilities such as Time Machine, Apple’s Migration Assistant, and SuperDuper!. The company’s customer support and feedback are both friendly and speedy, the software offers quick access to help guides and resources, and there’s a supportive community that lives and breathes this utility. This, combined with frequent updates from the developer only makes the software better, and if Carbon Copy Cloner isn’t in your arsenal of handy utilities, you should download it and give it a shot, as it should be.