Bombich Software Blog

While some developers seem surprised by a change in macOS 15.2, we've known for several years that making bootable backups would eventually become impossible. We shifted CCC's strategy away from relying on External Boot so our users wouldn't be affected by this inevitable result.

I took a few days off last week to help a family member, and returned to find the Mac community all aflutter with comments about bootable backups not working after the 15.2 update and comparisons of Apple to The Grinch. After reviewing a lot of comments on this subject, I felt it was time to weigh in. Apple is taking a lot of heat for this "bug" in 15.2, but if there is any finger-pointing here, I think it should be directed towards any developers that have misled their users into believing that ASR and "bootable backups" had any place in a backup/recovery strategy post-Big Sur.

This result does not come as a surprise

Several years ago I wrote a blog post about the macOS Big Sur changes that affected how third-party developers would be able to make copies of the System:

Beyond Bootable Backups: Adapting recovery strategies for an evolving...

I had the opportunity to evaluate the new U34 Bolt from Oyen, and I was only disappointed that this device doesn't literally scream or burn a hole through the desk. While delivering a stunning 3.1GB/s of sustained throughput, it was completely silent and no warmer than a cup of coffee (120°F/49°C). As exciting as that was, though, I thought this would be a good opportunity to explore why we don't always see peak performance from a storage device.

Please note that we never accept any type of compensation for product recommendations. The only benefit we receive from recommendations is positive experiences with our software.

Interface performance vs. device performance vs. filesystem performance vs. software performance

Perhaps once a month we'll get a comment, "Black Magic Speed Test shows XX MB/s, but the backup only gets YY MB/s. What gives?". Less frequently people will wonder how to find that 40Gb/s performance that Thunderbolt boasts. First, let's address the math that may not be obvious. "Gb/s" is not the same as "GB/s"; Gb/s is "Gigabits per second", GB/s is "Gigabytes per second". There are 8 bits in a byte, so 40Gb/s is comparable to 5GB/s. But, interface performance isn't...

There's one aspect of our company that I take a lof of pride in: our engineering team works directly with end users to solve problems and to create backup strategies. We don't have multiple tiers of support and focus groups, no chat bots or AI – we just talk directly with people. With that feedback going directly into product development, we're constantly polishing every aspect of CCC so that it works exactly the way it feels like it should. We want your backups to be successful, and we feel personally accountable for your success.

One common pattern of feedback we've gotten is that getting a backup volume formatted can be kind of challenging. What partition scheme to use, which format, how many volumes, which volume for what purpose – it can add up to a lot of decisions and steps! It's also too easy to do it in a suboptimal way, and not realize that your backup strategy is missing some key feature.

Today we're introducing CCC 7, which is loaded with new features and enhancements specifically designed to help you build a robust, flexible and successful backup strategy. At the top of the list is a backup volume setup...

We're on the eve of World Backup Day – March 31st (because you're an April Fool if you didn't back up on March 31), so now is a great time to revisit some Backup Best Practices. If you're already using CCC for your backups, you've got a great leg up! If you haven't given it a whirl yet, today is a great day to try it out.

We all want our backups to protect our data; that's the obvious reason for making them. But we also want them to be reliable, easy to use, fast, and generally out of sight. It's like that furnace in your attic – you want to know that it's working, but you don't want to have to think about it every day. Once a year, though, maybe you should give it some attention to make sure the condensate isn't going to start leaking through the ceiling. (Yes, that's a very specific analogy 😉)

Here are a few suggestions to get your backup strategy in top-shape.

Create a backup on directly-attached storage

NAS and cloud-based backups feel really convenient – until you have to restore a lot of data from them, or migrate that data...

We field a lot of support requests, and similar to a doctor's office, we see some extreme cases. One of those interesting extreme cases are folders with high file counts. Any time a folder has more than a few thousand items in it, the filesystem is going to be a lot slower when working with that folder. Adding a new file, for example, requires that the filesystem compare the new item name to the name of every other file in the folder to check for conflicts, so trivial tasks like that will take progressively longer as the file count increases. Gathering the enormous file list will also take progressively longer as the list gets larger. The performance hit is even more noticeable on rotational disks and network volumes, so we often see these sticking out in backup tasks.

Sometimes high folder counts can bring a backup task to a halt

Last week, one of our users found the task as shown above. Upon closer analysis, we determined that the "media" folder had 181,274 files in it. In other words, more than 10% of the files on the...

It's Fall here on the top of the globe, which means that temps are getting cooler, pumpkin seems to be in everything, and apples are in season. And of course, Apple is about to drop another new upgrade to macOS: Ventura. We've been testing the new OS over the summer, and I'm pleased to report that CCC is ready to protect your data before and after you apply this upgrade – we added official Ventura support to CCC 6.1.3, which we posted back in September.

Every year we make a handful of changes to CCC to support changes that Apple makes in the new OS. We have a mixed bag this year, and I wanted to point out just a couple things that work a little differently. Overall, the changes are pretty bland, which means this article will not be very exciting. So to spice things up, I added a recipe for Pumpkin Spice Muffins at the bottom.

System Preferences → System Settings

The name change seems innocuous, but the changes that Apple made to this application are really significant. Initially I was really flustered with the new layout. I...

CCC 5.1.27 and CCC 6 can make bootable copies of the system on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs (11.3+) right now, and we'll continue to support that functionality as long as macOS supports it.

But as Apple's platform continues to evolve, we have to design our recovery strategies around the current hardware capabilities. A bootable external device may not be a part of that strategy. CCC can do so much more than just make copies of the system, and now is the right time to revisit your backup strategy and make it even better with some of the new features in CCC 6.

For decades, Mac users have taken for granted the Mac's "External Boot" feature. Prior to Mac OS X, people could simply drag and drop the System folder from one volume to another; presto, external boot volume. When Apple made it more complicated with Mac OS X, we pioneered the "bootable backup" solution (nearly 20 years ago!), and this has been a feature we've reliably supported on every new Mac and every new OS since then.

But Apple has never been afraid of shaking things up to blaze new trails. Big Sur and the new...

We've had so many new features in the oven for a while, and now we're finally ready to share it with the world! CCC 6 offers unprecedented accountability for your backups and insight into what's changing on your Mac, plus a brand new file copier that's faster, smarter, and designed to adapt to Apple's fast pace of OS and filesystem innovation.

Take a look at what's new in CCC 6:

• Faster backups with our next-generation file copier
• Quick Update: Update your backups up to 20x faster
• Redesigned interface with Dark Mode, real time task performance info and estimated time remaining
• Snapshot navigator: Easy way to explore older versions of files
• CCC Dashboard: The new menubar app, now with snapshot disk usage
• Run backups "When files are modified on the source"
• Task Preview: See what will happen before you back up
• Backup Audit: Review what was copied and why
• Compare: Visual comparison of the source and destination
• Advanced file verification options
• Pause a backup, and several other features our users have asked for

The core CCC backup features you know and love are now better than ever!

My APFS-formatted rotational disks have always felt slower than when they were HFS+ formatted. The speed of copying files to them felt about the same, but slogging through folders in the Finder was taking a lot longer. At first I shrugged it off to the filesystem being new; "It just needs some tuning, it will come along." But that performance hasn't come along, and after running some tests and collecting a lot more data, I'm convinced that Apple made a fundamental design choice in APFS that makes its performance worse than HFS+ on rotational disks. Performance starts out at a significant deficit to HFS+ (OS X Extended) and declines linearly as you add files to the volume.

The rest of this article is fairly technical, here are the key takeaways:

• Enumerating an APFS filesystem on a traditional HDD (rotational disk) will take 3-20X longer than HFS+ on the same hardware.
• This performance difference is most noticeable on a macOS startup disk that is (or includes) a rotational disk.
• If Apple doesn't make some concessions in the APFS filesystem to accommodate the slower seek performance of HDD devices, then a rotational device will never be able to provide acceptable...

On the eve of World Backup Day and with stories like the Atlanta ransomware attack still in the news, now is a great time to revisit your backup strategy. It's also a great time for us to announce some great new features that we're getting ready to deliver as a free update to CCC 5 users – features that will help you improve your defenses against ransomware and malware.

Versioned backups with APFS Snapshots

CCC 5.1 offers support for point-in-time restores by leveraging the snapshot feature of Apple's new APFS filesystem. CCC's SafetyNet feature offered similar functionality to this in the past, but snapshots take it to a new level, allowing you to do things like restore a previous version of the OS and older versions of your Photos library.

CCC is also the first comprehensive snapshot management utility for macOS. Browsing the contents of any snapshot is just a click away, and should you want to delete a specific snapshot (whether created by CCC or Time Machine), just select it and press the Delete key. How much space are those snapshots consuming? CCC can tell you that. No other utility offers this much insight into your APFS volumes'...