On Saturday, Carbon Copy Cloner, the shareware favorite for drive cloning operations by Mike Bombich, reached version 3.5. The new version, an 8.6 megabyte download, adds the following fixes and changes:
– This version of Carbon Copy Cloner requires Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, OS X 10.7 Lion, or OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, and is fully qualified on each of those OSes. We will continue to provide user support and bug fixes for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard users on CCC 3.4.x for a while longer.
– Recovery HD support has been overhauled to better support the concept of “one Recovery HD partition per volume”, rather than one per disk. If you have multiple backup volumes with different OSes (e.g. Lion and Mountain Lion), CCC can associate a Recovery HD with each one and apply the appropriate OS to each Recovery HD partition.
– We have leveraged code signing within CCC for nearly five years. For GateKeeper compliance on OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, however, CCC is now signed with an Apple Developer Certificate.
– Most of the binaries in the CCC bundle are now 32/64-bit Intel-only binaries.
– Fixed an issue that appeared in 10.7.4, specific to Macs running Lion with a 64-bit kernel, in which the /Volumes folder on the destination volume would be locked rather than hidden. This resulted in external volumes being unmountable when booted from the backup volume.
– Performance of deleting scheduled tasks is much improved.
– CCC previously encountered some performance problems when simultaneously saving very large numbers of scheduled tasks (e.g. > 29). These problems should now be resolved. This is most applicable when updating CCC, or when CCC has been moved and all tasks must be re-saved at the same time.
– Updated graphics for High Resolution support on the new MacBook Pro (Retina).
Carbon Copy Cloner 3.5 retails for a US$39.95 shareware registration fee. The application requires an Intel-based Mac running Mac OS X 10.6 or later.
If you’ve tried the new version and have any feedback to offer, let us know in the comments.