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Choosing a backup volume

 

The goal of backing up your data is to protect yourself from hardware malfunction and accidental or malicious deletions. To effectively protect your data from both of these scenarios, it is best to back up to media that is not physically located inside your Macintosh (e.g. to an external Firewire or USB hard drive, or to another Macintosh), but at minimum to another physical hard drive (e.g. not to another partition on the same hard drive). Additionally, you should choose media that allows you to boot your Macintosh from the backup. A bootable backup gives you not only a really easy way to verify the fidelity of your backup, but it also allows you to instantly regain productivity should catastrophe strike. Rather than spending your morning restoring your OS and data, simply boot from your backup and carry on with your business.

For general performance considerations, please see our in-depth analysis of the factors that will affect how long it takes to back up your data. Before you purchase a hard drive for backup, consider the following options:

Internal or external?

If you have a Mac with room for additional internal hard drives, you can use that space for your backup hard drive. I prefer external hard drive enclosures for portability reasons — I can easily swap a pair of external hard drives between office and home to have an inexpensive offsite backup solution. This also gives me the opportunity to easily leverage that hard drive to back up multiple Macs.

USB, Firewire, or eSATA?

Many hard drive enclosures have Firewire, USB, or both interfaces for connecting the hard drive to your computer. Either of these interfaces will work fine for backing up and safeguarding your data, however, PowerPC Macs cannot boot from USB-attached hard drive enclosures. While Intel-based Macs can boot from either, I generally recommend using Firewire for performance reasons. Backups over Firewire are always faster than backups over USB. eSATA is a newer connectivity option that is very fast, though not quite as flexible as Firewire or USB and is not typically bootable.

Where should I buy it?

Hard drive enclosures are not all built the same, some are not even capable of booting a Macintosh. I prefer to work with vendors that cater to the Macintosh market because I can get assurance that they have tested their products with Apple hardware and Mac OS X. There is a lengthy thread in the public discussions on the subject of "What hard drive enclosures have you had success or failure with?" that is worth a read.

PLEASE NOTE: We strongly recommend that you find the means to dedicate a volume to the task of backing up your irreplaceable data. If you have data on your backup volume that exists nowhere else, it is not backed up! Whenever you target a volume for use with Carbon Copy Cloner, there is a risk that some files will be removed for one legitimate reason or another. CCC offers options and warnings to protect your data from loss, but nothing can protect your data from a misuse of CCC or a misunderstanding of the functionality that it provides.