Sequoia 15.2 and Carbon copy cloner

Kurt, I'm likely a strange outlier here in that (and likely do to some obsessive compulsive disorder) I frequently reformat my hard drive, often monthly. My concern isn't my files, back ups etc which are reliably stored in my iCloud Drive, google drive and of T7 drives. I'd like to make a clone of a fresh install with my trusted applications so I can quickly do a quick clean recovery and then simply use my files from the cloud as needed.

Incredibly, I have been doing whole disk reinstalls of my OS and reinstalling programs manually for years now. I realize I'm a silly person. Do you have a suggestion for this application? Thanks in advance.

While it isn't necessary to erase the drive that frequently (unless you're the type of person who routinely installs apps from shady sources), here's what you can do.

a) Do your erase and reinstall.

b) Install and set up your known third party apps you always use.

c) Get your daily use data back on the drive, such as word processing documents, etc.

d) With the drive in a pristine state, connect an external drive formatted as APFS.

e) Use Disk Utility to create a new volume (not a hard partition). Give it a name that's logical to you. Such as, I have my startup drive named Sequoia. The volume on the external SSD is Sequoia Backup.

f) Use CCC to make what is now a standard backup.

g) Note that I have both the SafetyNet, and Manage snapshots off for the target drive. I personally find no use or need for those.

Never touch that backup after this. Create a separate volume on the external drive if you want do other incremental backups (which would mostly duplicate the clean volume) in-between restores.

You don't have to fully erase the drive each time, either. It's much faster to use a function in macOS. I just setup a new M4 Pro mini, and moved my M2 Pro mini over for my wife's use. Here's what I did.

a) Made a last CCC backup of the M2 Pro to my external drive, disconnected it and turned it off.

b) Swapped out the M2 Pro with the M4 Pro and turned it on.

c) The first thing it asks is if you have data to restore. I turned on the external drive and pointed it to my CCC backup.

d) When the restore is done, everything is back on the Mac exactly as you last had it in your backup. All except for the Privacy & Security entries in the System Settings. Those all have to be added again as needed.

Now, here's really where your restore sequence would come in, and is how I restored my wife's 2018 mini CCC backed up data to the M2 Pro.

a) The is the much faster part. System Settings > General > Transfer or Reset > Erase All Content and Settings.

b) Everything that is not part of macOS will be removed from the drive. The end result will be a Mac that will be set back to the default, out-of-the-box state without spending nearly as much time as a full erase of the drive and reinstall of the OS would.

c) When the Mac finishes resetting itself to a factory state, it will come up with the "Hello" screen. You point it to your clean CCC backup volume and restore that.

Do this anytime you want to restore your Mac to your last clean state. The only time you would ever write to that external clean volume would be immediately after a restore, and you want to install new third party apps you know you're always going to use. As soon as the new apps are installed, update your clean CCC backup. Then those new apps will be added to that volume and you won't have to keep reinstalling them after a restore.

Restoring a clean backup is a very handy way to get rid of lots of apps you were testing all at once. Then you know for sure there are no leftovers anywhere on the drive.

Also very smart to have a bootable USB drive of an OS installer on hand since you can't be sure when you're going to have a reliable internet connection.

You're not glued to Time Machine. Lots of folks use and prefer it. I don't like it and have always used CCC for my backups and restores.

Well, actually, I first used SuperDuper! for many years, but there was a period where it was taking months for the developer to update it to work in what was the latest macOS release at the time. After seeing many users recommending CCC here, I tried it as a demo and instantly made it my de facto backup app.

Old Toad wrote:

CCC only gives you the latest version of all files.

CCC can optionally make snapshots via its "Safety net" feature. I have a few times mounted such snapshot and grabbed an old version of some file.

Matti Haveri wrote:

CCC can optionally make snapshots via its "Safety net" feature. I have a few times mounted such snapshot and grabbed an old version of some file.

That's good to know. I have no idea what they were. Thanks.

You're welcome.

I'll let you know in a bit if CCC 7.0.4 will successfully clone a Sequoia boot drive to an external SSD. I'm doing it now. So far it seems to be plugging along nicely on my M4 Mini. "Video at 11".

Thanks for the info. I didn't see the Smart Update option in Version 3.8. It asked me if I wanted to upgrade to 3.9. May have to. I'll see what happens with 3.8.