Installation Issue with Carbon Copy Cloner 3.1
For those of you eying Time Machine but still not ready to fully commit to OS X Leopard — sure, 10.5.2 is a big improvement, but I'm still waiting for that third time charm — I recommend Carbon Copy Cloner, which has just been updated to version 3.1.
CCC is free software. It can make scheduled backups to an external drive behind the scenes while you work. Your backup can even be bootable. But there is a minor installation hurdle for users of previous versions.
Despite being only a point release, Carbon Copy Cloner 3.1 sports some big improvements in capability over 3.0, most notably a much finer set of controls for both backup item lists and scheduling. I have also noticed that it is significantly faster, completing my backups in as little as two-thirds the time (even when copying the same amount of data).
In classic Mac fashion, upgrading CCC is theoretically as easy as dragging the application from the installer window to your Applications folder. But when I attempted to do just that, my Mac had this to say:
The above-referenced 'ccc_helper' is the background daemon that handles scheduled tasks, which I use liberally (one for duping my basic OS X installation once a month, and another twice a week for all my data). Alarmingly, this failed copy operation rendered my previous copy of CCC non-functional, and there was no warning at all about it in the accompanying ReadMe.
Luckily it wasn't fatal. Simply dragging the original to the trash first (an old Mac trick) enabled the subsequent copy to occur. And upon launch, the new version instantly detected the obsolete backup schedules and replaced those, too. The developer seems to have anticipated this issue and covered all the bases except for actual installation — which one might easily think of as home plate. This may seem odd, but it's human for a coder to take the download package for granted in testing, much as you might dress up perfectly for a night out and then forget your keys. It's the simple stuff that gets you. Unfortunately, the last step for the coder is the first step for the user, so this kind of oversight can exact a heavy toll in frustration if you don't immediately discover the workaround.
Once you've got it installed, however, CCC performs with the reliability, transparency, and simplicity I have come to expect from Mike Bombich.