Backing Up a Mac with Carbon Copy Cloner
Of all the lessons in digital photography nothing is as important as learning to protect your files using multiple external hard drives and good backup software. Maintaining an up-to-date backup is painless if you choose the right software. To keep my backup disk up-to-date, I am fond of Carbon Copy Cloner on the Mac and Acronis True Image Home for the PC. It doesn’t matter what program you use as long as your software makes it easy to create a perfect mirror, a complete clone, an exact copy of your all your precious photographs. What matters most is that your backup disk perfectly mirrors your main storage hard drive. If the two are identical and one dies then you haven’t lost anything!
For more on the importance of backups, and on how I use external hard drives to protect my precious images, please read these posts:
- My Photo Storage System: Two External Hard Drives
- Archives and Backup Copies
- Recommended External Hard Drives
Here is a tutorial that I created on backing up my Photo Library disk– my primary image storage disk– using Carbon Copy Cloner.
Backing up an External Hard Drive with Carbon Copy Cloner from David Marx on Vimeo.
If you find this program as useful as I do please send the creators a generous donation. I am happy to give a little for a program that has saved my butt when disaster strikes!
Filed Under: FAQ • Getting Started • Tutorials • Workflow
About the Author: David Marx has an extensive knowledge of digital photography and is an Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop and in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. David is a talented instructor and his entertaining teaching style works for students of all skill levels. He has been teaching digital photography and image enhancement with Adobe Photoshop since 2002. In addition, David’s sports and landscape images are often featured on the web and in outdoor sports publications.
In 2009, David Marx led digital photography programs for the 
I am assuming that you do not use the backup feature in Lightroom if you are backing up the eternal hard drive with Carbon Copy Cloner. Is that correct?
Good question, Patti. I’m sure David will chime in shortly, but it’s vital that you understand what the backup features in Lightroom actually do. There are two main ways that Lightroom helps with backups:
The take-home point here is that there is much more on our drives than just our images or just our Lightroom Catalog file. Having a proper backup of the entire drive will save you countless hours (perhaps days) of heartache down the road.
Remember: Hard Drives have a 100% failure rate. All hard drives will fail…it’s just a matter of time. Be prepared for that inevitable moment.
-Scott
In order to use CCC, must your drives be formatted HFS+? Do you ever use your photo library on a PC? If so, do you use MacDrive? And if you do, what has been your experience with that? I read your post where you say you can use either MacDrive on the PC, or the Paragon driver on the Mac to read/write to NTFS — but if you do that, is there anything you can run on the Mac to clone one external drive to another? Finally, when you run CCC, how are your hard drives connected? One firewire, one usb? Or some more exotic solution? I’m trying to set up two hard drives for the first time to use on both PC and Mac, with the Mac the primary computer, and every “solution” seems to have some serious difficulty. Cloning one drive to the other seems particularly problematic. Thanks in advance.
Dear jehannebc,
Sorry about the delay. With all the new Lightroom 3 questions this one slipped by me. To use Carbon Copy Cloner your drives must be formated HFS+ (aka Mac OS X Extended.) I do sometimes use them on a PC and find that they work just fine when connected to a PC using the MacDrive software. See my how to format an external hard drive post for more details. Assuming that both your primary and backu drives are formatted OS X Extended (HFS+) then Carbon Copy can clone them. If you are looking to clone NTFS drives with a Mac I would try either a robust disk management program like Drive Genius or using Windows.
Yes, I said use Windows on your Mac. You could use either Boot Camp or a virualization program like VM Fusion and then a Windows disk cloning / backup utility. The question that I have though is it worth all this hassle?
As far as how to connect the drives to the Mac you could go with one connected to a USB port and the other to the Firewire port but this will make the backup take a lot longer then if you connect both drives via Firewire. Firewire devices are meant to be daisy chained together which is why they almost always have two firewire ports. Connect the two drives to each other with one cable and then use another cable to connect one of them to the Mac.
I hope this helps and sorry again about the delay.
–
David
Thank you SO much for your reply. I was not familiar with Drive Genius. I did not want to run Windows on my new Mac, due to virus concerns. I did read, and follow, your post on formatting external drives (along with many of your other posts). And I decided to format the drives for the Mac, so I am glad to hear that MacDrive has caused you no problems, although I haven’t yet had to hook them up to the windows machine. The ability to use CCC was an important factor in deciding to format them the way I did.
I did not know that the drives could be daisy chained, so again, thank you for that information.
Now, I return to “Getting Started with Lightroom 3″ . . . .
Hi David,
I feel a little out of the loop here. I just recently began with Lightroom 3.0. I have an iMAC and a 1GB External WD Drive. I have Time Machine running. It backs ups every hour or so. I wish Time Machine could be configured so it only could backup certain folders [Photos, MP3s, Lightroom Catalogs] but it doesn’t.
Seeing as it is, all of my photos and Lightroom Catalogs are being backed up.
Not enough?
Wouldn’t my Internal HDD *and* External have to go kaput for me to experience a disaster?
Tell me what I am missing here.
Thanks!
Dear Robert Gomes,
You are right that Time Machine will backup your entire internal hard drive to your external disk every hour. Time Machine is a great way to protect your computer’s internal disk but it is not very flexible. As you pointed out, you cannot tell it which folders to exclude from its hourly backup. Worse, you cannot use it to backup one external disk to another without combining that disks contents in with the contents of your external hard drive. This becomes a big problem when your image library exceeds your internal hard drive’s storage capacity. Time Machine is not ideal for photographer’s like me who use separate external disks for both my primary storage system and for my backups. See http://thelightroomlab.com/2009/05/my-photo-storage-system-two-external-hard-drives/ for more details.
If you are going to keep your images on your Mac’s internal hard drive, and if you are going to use Time Machine to backup the whole disk, then you might want to check out a handy little utility called Time Machine Scheduler. Time Machine Scheduler allows you to change the amount of time that passes between each incremental backup. I appreciate Apple’s interest in backup up your entire computer every hour but that seems a little excessive for most users.
–
David
David,
I think the greatest disappointment with the Time Machine is that you cannot, like we both mentioned, select which folders to backup.
I think this Time Machine Scheduler is a nice addition. 1 hour is far too frequent in my eyes.
If someone could devise a way to backup select folders — that’d be awesome!
Thanks for all of your help David.
I think all of you who spend countless hours sharing your knowledge online are very UNDERAPPRECIATED.
So: thanks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Robert