Product Reviews

Cloning a hard drive under Mac OS 9 was a painless process - you simply dragged and dropped its contents to an external source, and then moved the results on to a Mac booted from a CD. Things have changed with Mac OS X, as it contains numerous permissions, hidden files and folders that are intrinsic to running your Mac.

Bombich Software's Carbon Copy Cloner 2.0 is a piece of donationware that makes the job almost as easy as it used to be. Using this application, you can create a complete and bootable copy of any drive attached to your Mac.

Such a backup has numerous uses. For example, it saves laboriously reinstalling everything when upgrading to a new Mac or a larger hard drive. It also enables you to make a bootable version of your hard drive if you need to fix your boot drive, or if your Mac needs to go in for repair. It even allows you to set up multiple

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machines rapidly.

Our tests involved cloning the contents of a hard drive between an iBook, an external FireWire hard drive and a Power Mac G4. While the speed will depend on your setup, we were impressed that 20Gb of data was cloned in well under two hours. In all cases, the cloned information remained in excellent condition. The only problem we noted was that we need to reboot a saved Virtual PC setup.

This version of Carbon Copy Cloner offers a number of new features, including the welcome arrival of synchronisation of the source and target along with scheduled backups that can occur in the background, as well as the ability to create a NetBoot image from a customised OS X installation.

What this means is that Carbon Copy Cloner is now effectively a basic backup solution. Moreover, it's somewhat cheaper than the competition, and often more effective and reliable.

Clone ranger

We did have some niggles with the GUI. It's not particularly responsive during cloning, and we'd prefer to be able to retrieve items removed from the cloning list without resetting it entirely.

However, these are small gripes and shouldn't put you off checking out Carbon Copy Cloner 2.0. While it's not a heavyweight professional backup solution, being able to back up your system completely and make it bootable for Bombich's suggested donation of $5 is great value. In fact, Apple would be wise to buy this product and incorporate it into OS X.