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Scheduling a task

 

Carbon Copy Cloner offers hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly scheduling. If your workstyle is too hectic for scheduling, you can also schedule a task to run whenever your backup hard drive is attached to your computer. To schedule a backup task, first configure CCC as if you were going to run a backup task immediately. Instead of clicking on the Clone button, click on the "Save Task" button. In the Scheduler window that appears, provide a name for the scheduled task (double-click "Untitled") and indicate when you want the task to run.

The Carbon Copy Cloner Scheduler

Scheduling a task

To schedule a task, choose the desired repetition interval from the popup menu next to "Run this task:". If you would rather have the backup task run only when the target volume is reattached to your computer, choose "When target is reconnected".

The Carbon Copy Cloner Scheduler

Next choose how many (hours, days, weeks, or months) you would like to skip between backup events ("Repeat every:"). Finally, indicate the time of day at which you would like the event to start. When scheduling a task to run on a weekly basis, you may also indicate what days of the week on which your task should run. At the bottom of the scheduler window, CCC will indicate how frequently the task will run and when it is next scheduled to run.

Note: Do not attempt to modify the schedule of a task that is currently running. If you need to modify the schedule of a running task, stop the task first. If the running task is performing a block-level clone, it is advisable to wait for the task to complete rather than stopping the task.

The "Task finished" panel

When a scheduled backup task has run and completed, a dialog will be presented indicating that the task has completed. At the bottom of that panel is a checkbox that indicates "Show this panel only when errors occur". When that box is checked, the scheduled task will close the progress indication panel and main window when the task completes successfully without your intervention. Rather than implementing another checkbox elsewhere to re-enable that notification, this setting is simply reset any time you make changes to your scheduled task. If you want the notifications to return, open the Scheduler window in CCC (choose "Scheduled tasks..." from the Carbon Copy Cloner menu), uncheck, then recheck the box next to your scheduled task and press the Save button, make a change to the timing of the scheduled task, or click the "Run" button to run the task immediately. Any of these settings changes will reset the setting to show the "task finished" panel.