Download & install
Grab the carbon copy cloner download for Mac free from this page and drag CCC into your Applications folder. ~30 MB · Apple-notarised installer.
v7.1.2 · macOS 12 → 26 · Apple Silicon native
Carbon Copy Cloner Mac Free — bootable backup & full disk clone
Download Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) for Mac free and create a complete, bootable copy of your startup disk in minutes. Scheduled backups, snapshot retention, cloud destinations and verified byte-by-byte cloning — the trusted mac backup standard since 2002.
4.9 · 5,800 reviews
Apple-notarised
No subscription
1.5M+Macs backed up
24 yrsSince 2002
10 minFirst backup
$0Full version
How it works
Bootable backup in three steps
From download to a verified, bootable clone — under 10 minutes on Apple Silicon, no expert knowledge required.
Pick source & destination
Choose your startup disk as source, plug in an external SSD as destination, and set a schedule. CCC handles APFS, snapshots and verification automatically.
Start the first clone
Click Start. The first run copies everything; every later run only copies what changed. If a drive ever fails, you boot from the clone and keep working.
What CCC does
Everything a serious mac backup needs
Six modules in one app — each one closes a different recovery gap so a single failure never costs you your work.
01
Bootable mac hard disk clone
Create a complete, bootable copy of your Mac's startup disk. Plug in the destination drive, hold Option at boot (or use Startup Disk on Apple Silicon), and you're up and running from the clone in seconds.
02
Scheduled backups
Hourly, daily, weekly, on connect, idle or wake — incremental after the first full clone.
03
APFS snapshots
Roll back to any prior state — restore a single file or an entire folder from a week ago.
04
Cloud & network destinations
Back up to local drives, NAS, SMB/AFP/NFS shares or cloud storage — chain destinations in one task for layered protection.
05
Byte verification
Checksum pass after every clone confirms source = destination exactly.
06
Menubar Dashboard
Live status, transfer chart and next-run timer — one click to start, stop or skip.
Inside the app
A clean, focused interface built for backup
Six core views handle everything. Click through the tabs to see how CCC presents tasks, schedules, snapshots and advanced options.
SuperDuper vs Carbon Copy Cloner
How CCC compares to other Mac backup tools
Six head-to-head features that matter most when you actually need to restore.
| Feature | Carbon Copy Cloner | SuperDuper! | Time Machine | Backblaze |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bootable mac hard disk clone | ||||
| Incremental scheduling | Basic | |||
| APFS snapshot retention | ||||
| Cloud destinations | ||||
| Byte-by-byte verification | Hidden | |||
| Price | Free | $28 | Free | $99/yr |
↔ swipe to compare all columns
Mac & Windows
Carbon Copy Cloner for Mac, options for PC
CCC is Mac-only. For carbon copy cloner windows / pc users, free disk-imaging tools cover the same scenarios.
Carbon Copy Cloner for MacThe official CCC app
Mac carbon copy cloner is the standard for serious backup on macOS. It treats your Mac as a single, recoverable system — not just a folder of files — so you can rebuild after a failed SSD or a botched system update in minutes instead of days.
- Native bootable clones (T2 & Apple Silicon)
- APFS snapshots with point-in-time restore
- Smart Updates — incremental after first full clone
- Universal binary — M1, M2, M3, M4
- macOS Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma, Sequoia & Tahoe
Carbon Copy Cloner for WindowsClosest free PC alternatives
Looking for carbon copy cloner for pc or carbon copy cloner windows? The official CCC ships for Mac only. Windows users get equivalent free tools that deliver the same disk-imaging and bootable-backup capability.
- Macrium Reflect Free — bootable disk image & schedule
- Hasleo Backup Suite Free — incremental imaging & clone
- AOMEI Backupper Standard — system & disk clone
- EaseUS Todo Backup Free — file-level recovery
- Veeam Agent for Windows Free — full system backup
My SSD failed during a final cut export. I plugged in the external drive, booted from the Carbon Copy Cloner clone, and was finishing the project 90 seconds later. No reinstall. No iCloud sync. No lost day.
Daniel R. · Freelance video editor, Berlin
Download Carbon Copy Cloner Mac Free
Full version. No subscription. No trial countdown. Get the carbon copy cloner download for Mac and start your first bootable backup in under 10 minutes.
// The creative pro guide · 2026
Carbon Copy Cloner for working video editors, photographers, designers and producers
Your Mac is not a "personal computer" — it is a render farm, a colour suite, a darkroom and a recording studio with 500 GB or more of irreplaceable client work sitting on a soldered internal SSD. Carbon copy cloner is the bootable backup app that treats your Mac that way. It makes a byte-accurate, bootable duplicate of every Final Cut library, Premiere project, DaVinci timeline, Capture One catalogue, Logic session and Photoshop scratch so a dead drive on Friday afternoon never becomes a missed Monday deadline.
This page is the carbon copy cloner download hub written specifically for paid creative workflows. You can grab carbon copy cloner mac free from here, see exactly how the app fits a deadline-driven studio, and pair carbon copy cloner for mac with an external SSD that boots on any spare machine in the room.
Why creatives clone instead of sync: Adobe Creative Cloud, Dropbox and iCloud sync finished files — they do not sync render caches, plugin presets, font licences, colour profiles or the exact version of Resolve you were colouring in last night. A bootable clone does.
Built for project drives
What carbon copy cloner means when your mac backup is the deliverable
The "carbon copy" idea: a destination volume so identical to the source that the two are interchangeable. For a freelance editor that promise has teeth. Carbon copy cloner implements it correctly for creative workflows: APFS snapshots, permissions, extended attributes, sparse files and resource forks all preserved.
Creative project files are sparse, link-heavy and depend on extended attributes — properties that consumer backup tools silently corrupt. CCC preserves all of them, which is why mac carbon copy cloner is on every working colourist's external SSD.
Sync services give you yesterday's exported JPEG. A clone gives you the exact session you were editing at 2 a.m. — layers, undo stack, render cache and all.
Inside a creative workflow
Three things mac carbon copy cloner does that NLE-native auto-save cannot
Carbon copy cloner for mac is built for the moving parts of a modern creative system — Apple Silicon's signed system volume, plugin authorisations, calibration profiles, project caches. Each one is preserved exactly on the clone.
Boot the clone on a borrowed Mac
Plug the external SSD into the studio's spare M3, hold Option (or pick it in Startup Disk), and you are inside your own colour-managed session in under a minute — same fonts, same plugins, same project trees.
Schedule around render windows
Run incrementals every hour during edit, or only between exports — CCC respects when you are pegging the GPU and queues itself for idle moments.
Roll back a bad keyframe
APFS snapshot history lets you pull a clean version of an Ableton session or a Photoshop master from three days ago without disturbing today's clone.
Live progress at NLE pace. Source, destination and automation in one focused window — the same window you can leave open while DaVinci is exporting in the background.
Tools rated for billable work
CCC against the other mac backup options a working studio actually considers
Two questions land in every freelance forum: is carbon copy cloner free, and superduper vs carbon copy cloner — which is faster for a 4 TB Premiere project drive? Short answers below. The short version: when you bill by the deliverable, you want the tool that recovers fastest, snapshots smartest, and never asks you to chase a subscription renewal mid-deadline.
vs SuperDuper!
Smart Update keeps render caches current
CCC's incremental engine copies only new clips and proxies after the first full run. SuperDuper is simpler but reclones unchanged media on its slower schedule — painful when your project drive holds 6 TB of ProRes.
vs Time Machine
Project bundles, not loose files
Time Machine restores files. A CCC clone restores the entire creative environment — exact plugin versions, font activations, colour profiles and LUT folders — bootable on any Mac in the room.
vs Backblaze
Local SSD beats a 30-hour cloud pull
Cloud-only services are great for off-site copies, lousy for emergency rescue — restoring 4 TB of footage over residential broadband eats the entire week. With CCC, you boot from the desk drive in seconds.
Mac & Windows studios
Carbon copy cloner for Mac plus the closest PC equivalents for hybrid teams
Many post houses run Mac in the edit suite and Windows in the VFX bay. The carbon copy cloner windows answer is the same as the carbon copy cloner for pc question: there is no official CCC for Windows, but three free tools cover the same image-and-restore workflow.
Pair any of these with an external NVMe enclosure and your Windows artists get the same insurance the editors already have: a recent, bootable image of the whole workstation, ready to swap onto identical hardware.
M
Macrium Reflect Free
Bootable disk imaging, scheduled tasks and rescue USB. The closest one-to-one analog to CCC for Windows artists running After Effects or Nuke.
Top pick
H
Hasleo Backup Suite Free
Full plus incremental system imaging and a separate disk-clone tool. Strong recovery environment for 3D scene caches and Substance libraries.
Advanced
A
AOMEI Backupper Standard
System clone, disk clone and file backup in one free app — friendly enough for a motion designer who would rather be in After Effects than a recovery wizard.
Beginner
Ten minutes between exports
Setting CCC up to back up your Mac mid-project, without slowing the edit
Configuring backup for macbook Pro studios with CCC takes about ten minutes between two ProRes exports. After the first run the schedule does the work — most editors only reopen the app the day a drive fails. Here is the production-floor procedure to back up mac systems carrying live client jobs.
Install on the working machine
Drop CCC into Applications on the edit Mac. ~30 MB, Apple-notarised, no restart, no kernel extensions — safe to install on a session day.
Connect an identical-size external SSD
Pick a Thunderbolt 4 or USB-C NVMe drive at least as large as your internal storage. The goal of a backup macbook clone is byte-for-byte parity, so the destination needs to fit the whole startup volume and the project bundle.
Pick source, destination and a non-render schedule
Open CCC, set Macintosh HD as source and the external as destination. Schedule the incremental for lunch, overnight, or "on idle" so it never competes with a Resolve render or a Logic bounce.
Run the first clone, then forget it
Click Start. First pass copies everything; later passes only copy the clips, layers and project files that changed. Snapshots are on by default so you can roll a single Photoshop master back to yesterday.
Pull yesterday's master back. The snapshot browser lists every retained APFS state so you can extract a single PSD, ARW or PRPROJ from before that "improvement" you regret.
The deadline always wins
Why creative pros still treat backup software for Mac as production gear
Apple Silicon SSDs are soldered — a dying chip is unrecoverable. Cloud-stored masters are too big to re-pull on deadline. Lose any of it the morning of a client review and the next call is bad.
One external SSD + CCC = a second Mac in a pocket
The most honest insurance for paid work is a complete, current bootable backup software for mac on a drive in your camera bag. CCC is the simplest path to that drive — a bootable mac hard disk clone that turns any compatible Mac in the room into your edit suite within minutes of a failure.
Creative Cloud is not a backup
It syncs finished assets, not project caches, render queues, plugin authorisations or font activations.
Soldered SSDs fail without warning
There is no swap, no chip pull, no rescue service — only the clone you made the day before.
Rebuild time eats the invoice
Reinstalling macOS, the Adobe suite, Resolve and twenty plugins burns a day you billed to a client.
For working photographers, editors, designers and music producers, the only backup software for mac that survives a deadline is the one that boots straight into a working creative system — apps, plugins, calibration intact.
Grab the Carbon Copy Cloner download for Mac free before the next deadline
Full version. No subscription, no trial countdown, no feature paywall. Pull the carbon copy cloner download, point it at a spare SSD, and your first bootable clone of the studio Mac is done between this morning's exports and the afternoon review.
1.5M+Macs backed up
4.9 ★5,800 reviews
24 yrsSince 2002
$0Free forever
Frequently asked
Questions about Carbon Copy Cloner
What is Carbon Copy Cloner?
Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) is mac backup and cloning software that creates a complete, bootable copy of your Mac's startup disk. It can also back up specific folders, schedule incremental tasks, retain historical snapshots and verify every byte after each run.
Is Carbon Copy Cloner free?
Yes. You can download Carbon Copy Cloner Mac free from this page and use the full version with no time limit. There is no trial countdown, no feature paywall, and no subscription — full backup, cloning and snapshot functionality is included.
Does Carbon Copy Cloner work on Windows?
The official Carbon Copy Cloner is a Mac-only backup app. For carbon copy cloner windows workflows, Macrium Reflect Free, Hasleo Backup Suite Free and AOMEI Backupper Standard give Windows users the same disk imaging and bootable clone capability for free.
SuperDuper vs Carbon Copy Cloner — which is better?
Both create bootable mac backups. Carbon Copy Cloner offers more scheduling options, snapshot retention on APFS volumes, cloud destinations, task chaining and a faster engine. SuperDuper is simpler but lacks incremental scheduling and snapshot features.
Which macOS versions does CCC support?
Carbon copy cloner for mac runs natively on macOS Monterey (12), Ventura (13), Sonoma (14), Sequoia (15) and macOS Tahoe (26). The latest release supports both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs — M1, M2, M3 and M4.
Is a bootable backup really necessary?
For anyone whose Mac is their work machine, yes. Time Machine recovers files; a bootable CCC clone recovers the entire system. Plug in the external clone, boot, keep working.