Carbon Copy Cloner 5.1.7

Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/watchlist/carbon-copy-cloner-5-1-7/

Proactively warns about configurations specific to Macs with a T2 security chip that will produce non-bootable results. ($39.99 new, free update, 16.4 MB)

I’m trying to fully understand the warning in my Carbon Copy Cloner utility. Am I correct that I can over ride the warning that occurs by rebooting in Recovery (Cmd-R) mode and then selecting the external drive as the startup? I just did a backup with the updated CCC App and got the warning. And yes, my new MacBook Air has the T-2 chip.

Further, did this situation exist in prior versions of CCC and the developers decided they needed to issue the warning in this update? Thanks in advance.

The T2 chip in recent Macs allows one to disable booting from external media. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208330 for specific information on controlling this feature and https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208862 for an introduction to the T2 chip as well as links to its other feature.

So, Carbon Copy Cloner is warning you that you might need to run the Startup Security Utility on the Recovery Disk before booting from an external backup. However, if you are only trying to recover files from your backup disk and not restart from it, you don’t need to play with this.

About six weeks ago I replaced my old MacBook Air with the new model and wanted to restore the entire contents from old to the new Mac. Now I understand why I couldn’t startup from the CCC backup on an external hard drive. Being a belt and suspenders guy I wound up restoring the content from a Time Machine backup but that took several hours. If I’d then known about the Startup Security Utility life would have been easier. Thanks for your explanation.

I turned this off when I recently had to move some files from my hard disk and create some symbolic links to an external discs. Should I turn it back on now?