Reminder: Recovery HD volume cloning is not applicable to APFS-formatted destination volumes (i.e. Catalina and later)
Carbon Copy Cloner offers complete support for archiving, cloning, and recreating Apple's Recovery HD partition. See the Cloning Apple's Recovery HD partition section of CCC's Disk Center documentation for instructions to create a Recovery HD volume on your backup disk.
A welcome side-effect of cloning one volume to another is that the files on the resulting volume are largely defragmented. While fragmentation is not as significant of an issue as it used to be (e.g. in the Mac OS 9 days), people that have begun to fill the last 10-15% of their boot volume may see some performance benefit from defragmentation. If you find yourself in this situation, this is also a really good time to consider migrating to a larger hard drive altogether, or to an SSD, which is not affected by fragmentation.
Often when you have a backup task that runs on a scheduled basis, there are associated tasks that you would like to perform before or after files are actually copied. CCC offers the option to run shell scripts before and after a backup task, unmount or set the destination as the startup disk, run another CCC backup task, and power management options such as restart and shutdown. If you would like to perform any of these pre or post clone tasks, click the Advanced Settings button below CCC's Source selector.
There are several factors that affect the performance of your backup tasks. Here we describe the most common conditions that affect backup performance, and offer some suggestions for mitigating the effects of those conditions.
You can access the contents of a disk image the same way that you access other volumes and external hard drives on macOS. Double-click on the disk image file to mount its filesystem, then navigate the filesystem in the Finder to access individual files and folders. If you have the permission to access the files that you would like to restore, simply drag those items to the volume that you would like to restore them to.
Carbon Copy Cloner includes a command line utility that allows you to start, stop, and monitor the progress of specific CCC backup tasks. The utility is located inside of the CCC application bundle. To get basic usage instructions, invoke the utility without arguments in the Terminal application, e.g.:
Carbon Copy Cloner offers the option of securely copying your selected data to another Macintosh on your network (or anywhere on the Internet for that matter) via the Remote Macintosh... options in the Source and Destination selectors. After a brief setup procedure to establish trust between your Mac and the destination Mac, simply choose the source or destination volume/folder on the remote Mac and CCC will take care of the rest.
CCC determines whether your destination volume will be bootable and indicates any configuration concerns in the "Cloning Coach" window. If you see a yellow warning icon in the Task Plan header, you can click on that icon to see these concerns. CCC will also present these concerns to you the first time that you configure a backup task to any particular destination volume.
