My backup with Carbon Copy Cloner

This post is about how I’m doing the backup of my Mac using (the great) Carbon Copy Cloner software. Maybe you can take some inspiration.

My setup is to have an external SSD that is always connected via USB-C to my Mac, but I don’t want to leave it mounted on my macOS system every time, due to security and because this would cause more disk wear. So I leave my disk attached to my Mac and CCC should mount it and do the backup, just in case that CCC fails to mount your disk, you can add a bash preflight script to mount it before the backup begins. The script is very simple but you have to identify your volume using

diskutil list

In my case the volume is the disk4s1 due to size and name:

/dev/disk4 (synthesized):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      APFS Container Scheme -                      +1000.0 GB  disk4
                                 Physical Store disk3s2
   1:                APFS Volume ⁨Backup iMac⁩             169.8 GB   disk4s1

Then just write the script, save it somewhere and make it executable via chmod 777 (if it’s not).

#!/bin/sh
diskutil mount /dev/disk4s1 
exit 0

Replace the disk name with your name and add it to “Preflight shell script” in CCC interface.

Since usually I’m not at home when it does the backup, I want to know if CCC has made the backup and if it has completed it without errors. So I use the nice “Send me an email” feature of CCC and the email I received every day looks like this:

The template to create it:

And the text template with the correct tabs and layout that you can copy and paste:

Computer:			##Computer Name##
Source:				##Source##
Destination:			##Destination##
Start time:			##Start Time##
Elapsed time:		     	##Elapsed Time##
Data copied:			##Data Copied##
Total data in file set:	##Total Data##
Files copied:			##Files Copied##
Carbon Copy Cloner:	##CCC Version##

##Task Configuration##

##Error Description##

Have a nice backup!