Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Mac cloning solutions: Super Duper vs. Carbon Copy Cloner

I just found this old draft blog post just hanging out not quite finished. I didn't even realize that I hadn't published it. Even though it's a little dated, CCC is still just awesome. I use time machine for system backups, but when cloning a hard drive nothing out there beats CCC. I used it again recently when I upgraded Mathea's machine from a 250gb to a 500gb drive, my parents from a 160gb to a 320gb, and mine from a 500gb to a 750gb... Yes, in one month I had to crack open 3 apple laptops and swap hard drives. Anyway, Carbon Copy Cloner is great and you should try it out.

I also still have a couple of laptop hard drives available if anyone wants them. Installation services included.
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I've been a big fan of Super Duper for a long time. The interface is clean; it's reliable; while you are supposed to pay for it, you get most of the functionality for free. It can do incremental or full backups. Nice software.

Carbon Copy Cloner has been around for a long time also, but I never really checked it out until today. (I'll get to the reason in a minute.) I have to say I'm impressed. The UI is just a tiny tiny bit less clean, clear, and easy. But really, just a tiny bit. There's nothing wrong with the UI, it's just not as polished as Super Duper is.
However - there are two other areas where CCC is very superior to Super Duper. The first is pricing. I know I just finished telling you that almost all functionality in Super Duper is free, but... Well, the developer of CCC says it best - here is a quote from the product page:

Making donations

CCC is considered donation-ware (uncrippled shareware). I worked hard developing CCC and its methodology and documenting it on the internet for the rest of the Mac OS X community. If you find CCC indispensable, please consider making a donation. Please note that if you are using CCC for an educational institution, you should NOT donate to Bombich Software. My heart is in Education and all software that I write shall always be free to Education.


I love it.

Now, the reason I went to CCC in the first place is that I'm copying my nearly full 320GB that's currently in my MBP to a new 500GB that I just bought via firewire 800. I started a copy using Super Duper. Even though I had configured it to erase the destination drive before starting and then clone the source drive to the destination drive, (copy EVERYTHING) it was evaluating each file to determine if it needed to be copied before it copied it. I'm not positive that that's what slowed it down, but it was going very slow and the progress display kept saying that it was evaluating files (and then copying them.)

The 320 --> 500 is the biggest I've ever done from my mac and I just couldn't take how slow it was going. After half an hour it was maybe 15% done so I canceled it knowing that perhaps I had just cost myself 30 minutes and would have to just start over again.

I downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner just to give it a try. I'm so glad I did.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

New terminator preview

I just watched the new terminator preview - this movie will not disappoint...

Watch it here: