On Tuesday, Carbon Copy Cloner, the shareware favorite for drive cloning operations by Mike Bombich, reached version 3.5.3. The new version, an 11.4 megabyte download, adds the following fixes and changes:
– This update is fully qualified on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, OS X 10.7 Lion, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, and now OS X 10.9 Mavericks.
– CCC now offers volume-specific advice about how to enable full disk encryption. Enabling encryption on an OS X backup volume, for example, involves several steps that must be executed in the correct order. If full disk encryption is not supported on a particular volume, CCC indicates exactly why not. We have also added answers to some frequently asked questions about full disk encryption to our documentation.
– Fixed an odd edge case in OS X in which you can mount a network volume using a short user name, such as “johnny”, but the remote host will place the long name in the filesystem URL that is returned, e.g. “Johnny Appleseed”. Previously, this difference would cause CCC to believe that the network volume was mounted with other credentials altogether, and CCC would refuse to use the network volume under the assumption that permissions issues would ensue. This update addresses that issue, CCC will now immediately evaluate the filesystem URL of the network volume that is returned in reponse to its mount request and update its own internal reference to the user account as appropriate.
– Fixed an issue in which CCC may refuse to allow the user to schedule a backup task to a disk image that resides on a FUSE volume.
– Fixed an issue in which a scheduled task could load in a hung state if the task configuration file was corrupted.
– Changed to accommodate some Drobo devices having a problem storing extended attributes larger than 1KB. Rather than reporting that the Drobo device is unable to accommodate the extended attribute, these devices report that the destination volume is full, even when there is adequate space available. This update catches this edge case and reports it in a more meaningful way.
– Changed to explicitly refuse to create a Recovery HD partition if it can positively identify the selected volume as a Drobo device. Drobo’s proprietary data moving techniques do not play well with dynamic partition changes, and Drobo specifically does not support the modification of partitioning outside of the Drobo Dashboard.
– Fixed an OS X 10.9 Mavericks-specific display anomaly in the list of items to be copied.
– Fixed an issue in which the OS rarely, but occasionally, does not send an “application finished launching” notification to the scheduled task helper tool, causing task initialization to fail.
– Fixed an issue in which the OS rarely, but occasionally, does not send a distributed notification that a task has finished, resulting in the task appearing to hang at the end despite the fact that it had actually finished.
– Fixed the option to “Silently skip if the source or destination is missing”, CCC will no longer proceed with that backup task if the missing volume reappears before the next scheduled run time. The task will instead run on its normal schedule.
– Fixed the “LOGIN” SMTP authentication mechanism for Apple’s iCloud SMTP service which recently started to return invalid challenge responses to SMTP clients, causing some CCC email notifications to fail (for users that use iCloud SMTP accounts with CCC). This version of CCC works around this problem by preferring the
“PLAIN” authentication mechanism instead.
– Fixed an issue related to Google’s recent changes to its Gmail SMTP service that introduced a problem with sending email notifications to multiple recipients. This update resolves that problem.
Carbon Copy Cloner 3.5.3 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.