Carbon Copy Cloner v3.5 released. No longer donationware.

[Arthur]

Just in case you didn't know, Carbon Copy Cloner v3.5 was released a couple of days ago and now costs £19.27 + VAT (until 12/08/2012 when it will increase to £25.69). Discounted education licenses are also available.

Like many software titles receiving updates in advance of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, version 3.5 of Bombich Software’s Carbon Copy Cloner backup utility adds compliance with the Gatekeeper security feature and includes the capability to create a bootable Mountain Lion installer volume (once you’ve purchased and downloaded Mountain Lion). However, the bigger news is that the app is no longer donationware as Bombich Software transitions to a commercial model to grow its development and support team. Carbon Copy Cloner 3.5 now costs $39.95, but is available at a 25 percent discount ($29.96) through 12 August 2012. If you previously paid for Carbon Copy Cloner and checked the “I paid” button, you won’t be asked to purchase the app again (though if your preferences have been cleared, be sure to read the release notes to learn how to retrieve your registration info).

The new release overhauls its Recovery HD support for instances where you have multiple backup volumes with different operating systems, enabling you to associate a Recovery HD with each one and apply the appropriate operating system to each Recovery HD partition. Carbon Copy Cloner 3.5 now requires 10.6 Snow Leopard or later, but Bombich Software will continue to provide user support and fixes for version 3.4 used on 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard installations for the near future. The new release also improves performance of deleting scheduled tasks, fixes an issue that occurred when running Mac OS X 10.7.4 with a 64-bit kernel that resulted in external volumes not mounting when booted from a backup volume, and updates the graphics for displaying on the MacBook Pro with Retina Display. ($39.95 new, free update if you donated previously, 8.6MB) (Source)

[Carter]

I personally use it very rarely now but I guess this will put a steak in it for me from using it anymore. Was a great product and best of luck to Mike with it being a paid for App!

[mezmerrick]

I was surprised by this when the update popped up - but I can also understand it.

I use it on all my Apple servers as it is a very reliable back up solution. I'll probably pay for the latest version too.

[Rozzer]

As much as it is disappointing I think it has been a long time coming. Bombich has been producing good system apps for os x for years now and if people make good use of the application like any then it needs to be purchased.

Ross

[JR-PCS]

Surprised that Bombich has done this, as all CCC does is an rsync AFAIK. Its a good gui but now that it charges it is no better than superduper or many of the other cheap cloning software out there. Think I will keep hold of the final free version.

However, the one I am surprised is still free is Deploystudio. I reckon if they charged £50 for it, most schools would still buy it and they would probably make £500k within there first 18 months.

[Carter]

Surprised that Bombich has done this, as all CCC does is an rsync AFAIK. Its a good gui but now that it charges it is no better than superduper or many of the other cheap cloning software out there. Think I will keep hold of the final free version.

However, the one I am surprised is still free is Deploystudio. I reckon if they charged £50 for it, most schools would still buy it and they would probably make £500k within there first 18 months.

haha I was thinking about that this morning. CCC I will not pay for because I rarely use it but DeployStudio I use daily. I'm sure the college would flip $50 or a it more for a license for educational use. It's a great product.

[Rozzer]

Give deploy studio sometime it's still in rc stage it's only a matter of time but the product is well worth a price tag!

[Carter]

Give deploy studio sometime it's still in rc stage it's only a matter of time but the product is well worth a price tag!

RC for what, 5 years? Either way it's a great tool which is well worth buying over CCC.

[Rozzer]

RC for what, 5 years? Either way it's a great tool which is well worth buying over CCC.

Without a doubt been using it for years and been using it at ever install I do. Tend to only really use CCC for backup every now and again. I remember the days before deploystudio when it was net restore.

Ross

[Carter]

haha yaa, I remember the good days of CCC & netrestore. Heck I remember the days of making multiple copies of discs and running around the lab installing everything from scratch on each computer haha.

[JR-PCS]

haha yaa, I remember the good days of CCC & netrestore. Heck I remember the days of making multiple copies of discs and running around the lab installing everything from scratch on each computer haha.

Yeah that was not fun! I remember doing a large install of Macs at a university about 7 or 8 years ago and we deployed the image using about 10 external hard disks that we would boot from and then restore using disk utility. We had about 300 or 400 macs to image over 3 or 4 different sites about 30 miles apart and it took a good few weeks to get it all done!

[Arthur]

The Mac Observer have an interesting interview with Mike which explains why he has started charging for CCC...

www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/wwdc_working_for_apple_wasnt_enough_mike_bombich/

As of recently, I’ve started to make a transition away from the donation ware model. The reason for that... there are some things that have weighed upon me that have been very frustrating and that's exactly what you’re saying. When you look at a product, you compare a product that costs $30 and you compare it to something that has an apparent cost of nothing, some people think that there's less value to a product where they don't ask for anything.

Fair enough. I don't necessarily agree with that, but I certainly understand that perspective. A lot of people also assess the value of a product based upon the price that the developer or the vendor puts upon that. Again, I totally understand that. But again I have a philosophical problem with that, having been a college student, having been not a wealthy person.

And there are people who use the product for different things. I've got lots of people that will download it once, clone a volume, and then they’re done. They’re using Time Machine, or no backup at all (to each their own). There’s that kind of person, then there’s the person that's got 29 scheduled tasks, who I just worked with yesterday (it was a record), they backup a terabyte of data a day and they're using it on a couple of servers.


So there’s really a wide gamut of uses. It's hard to place a single monetary value on the one product that they download and use on one machine. It’s hard to say. I’ve got people who love it so much that they'll send me $100. That's great, and that's the value of the product to them. And then there are other people who, you know, think it's worth $5 or $20 or something like that. And that has worked really, really well for me. And I’ve really enjoyed it.

At least initially, what I'm going to try is moving to the commercial [market], where you purchase CCC, there's a 60-day trial. The trial is supported by the banners that people have seen in the software. That primarily covers the people who download it and use it once just to clone a volume. That's kind of what that covers, I certainly don't get massive amount of money from that. But then, there's the purchase button. So when the trial expires, you're expected to purchase. But when you purchase, you actually get to choose the amount that you want to pay. Which is strange.

[Stuartross]

The Mac Observer have an interesting interview with Mike which explains why he has started charging for CCC...

www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/wwdc_working_for_apple_wasnt_enough_mike_bombich/

Thanks Arthur.

Now, its clear that why CCC is not a donation-ware any more. Let me check how it is doing with Mountain Lion. Support for recovery HD in Lion is really appreciated.