Carbon Copy Cloner
Upgrading or replacing a Mac hard drive?
There are a many different ways to get info from your old hard drive to your new hard drive. You can use OS X’s Migration Assistant, Apple System Restore, Time Machine, do a block level clone or use software like Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC.)
While we use a lot different methods for data transfer depending on the circumstance, CCC is one of our favorites.
CCC allows you to easily make a “clone” of you old HD to a new HD. This way, all of you apps, settings, files and preferences come over and work exactly as they did on the old drive.
CCC uses some of the built in utilities of OS X like Apple System Restore and does a great job of adjusting user settings and permissions.
CCC requires a perfectly healthy HD to clone from. Sometimes even a hard drive boots and appears healthy, it won’t clone if there are bad blocks or other drive errors. Also, CCC can’t clone Windows partitions under Boot Camp. Utilities like Win Clone can help with Windows data migration.
Carbon Copy Cloner is a great addition to any tech’s Mac toolkit.
