Late Tuesday, Carbon Copy Cloner, the shareware favorite for drive cloning operations by Mike Bombich, reached version 3.4.4. The new version, a 6 megabyte download, adds the following fixes and changes:
– Made several changes to the preset configurations. Both the wording and some of the settings have been changed in response to user feedback and typical usage scenarios.
– New feature: CCC now provides support for archiving and cloning the Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Recovery HD partition. Choose “Disk Center” from CCC’s Window menu to find this functionality.
New feature: Scheduled tasks can now be configured to wake or boot the system when the task is scheduled to run.
– New feature: For users with a Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Installer application in /Applications, CCC’s Source menu now includes a handy “Create a Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Installer…” choice that will clone the Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Installation disk image onto a physical volume.
– Window positioning of the scheduled task helper application is now retained on a per-task basis, so you can move these windows around on your screen and multiple tasks won’t be stacked on top of each other.
– CCC will now mention the lack of a Recovery HD partition in the Cloning Coach prior to running the initial backup task.
– The table of scheduled tasks in the Scheduler window are now sorted alphabetically by default.
– Fixed a scheduler issue in which tasks scheduled to run on the first (any weekday) of the current month would be scheduled to run in the following month.
– Fixed an issue in which CCC was not “remembering” the last preset that had been selected upon relaunching CCC.
– Fixed an issue with the German localization related to the application of a particular setting in custom presets.
– Fixed an issue in which a scheduled task had trouble mounting a disk image when uncommon permissions conditions were present (such as when a system is bound to an Active Directory directory service).
– The “This volume will be bootable” message is back, though with a caveat that I have to insist upon from a support perspective. Many external hard drive enclosures still manage to screw up the boot process, and it’s impossible for me to determine if that is going to happen for any particular user from within CCC.
– When backing up to a subfolder, CCC now overlays an icon of the underlying volume on the folder icon in the task status panel.
– Scheduled tasks that specify a network volume as the destination are now aborted when CCC receives a sleep notification.
– Growl notifications should now work properly on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion with Growl 1.3.
– Email notifications now include the sender’s full name.
– Fixed a couple minor bugs associated with email notifications.
– Fixed an issue in which the scheduled task window would be unresponsive while CCC waited for a response from an email server.
– Added support for sending email to servers that use a self-signed certificate. This support is disabled by default, see the documentation for details on enabling this functionality.
– Resolved a problem in which an errant filter would protect items in folders that were to be deleted, resulting in CCC reporting that it couldn’t replace a particular folder or application.
– Fixed a minor 5-second shutdown hang associated with CCC scheduled tasks.
– Numerous tweaks to the advice that CCC offers for various error conditions.
– Fixed some Mac OS X 10.7 Lion-specific problems with the mounting of sparsebundle disk image files that are hosted on a network volume.
– If you’re running an ad hoc task in CCC (e.g. click “Clone” in the main window), CCC will ask before deleting anything from the _CCC Archives folder. To avoid problems that would affect automation, this warning is not provided for scheduled tasks.
– CCC is more proactive about dealing with the 4GB file size limitation of FAT32 volumes. Files larger than 4GB will now be excluded by default, and you’ll get a warning of this exclusion before running the task.
– Fixed a hang that would occur at the end of a scheduled task while CCC tried to unmount the destination volume (network volumes only, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion only).
– Made some cosmetic changes concerning ZFS support.
– Mail account settings on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion are now properly imported and populated into the email notifications tab of the scheduled tasks window.
– The path to a disk image file is now properly provided as the fourth argument to postflight scripts.
– Fixed a 30 second hang that would occur while saving changes to scheduled tasks on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. For every OS, though, saving scheduled tasks should be considerably faster.
Carbon Copy Cloner 3.4.4 retails for a US$10 shareware registration fee. The application requires Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later to run.
If you’ve tried the new version and have any feedback to offer, let us know in the comments.