Back up Mac using CarbonCopyCloner with command line only? Background:

I never expected to have only command line access to my Mac, but the day has arrived!  :)  Due to a video card problem, any attempt to boot the normal OS or recovery partition results in a kernel panic.  However, I can boot into Single User mode!  (The screen has a bunch of green horizontal lines through it every other pixel, but it is still readable.)

I have checked and verified that my data is intact.  I have a Genius Bar appointment to get the video card replaced.

I have a couple of backup drives on which I have CarbonCopyCloner backups of my computer, however these are out of date.



I want to back up my Mac from the Single User Mode command line using CarbonCopyCloner before I take it for the video card replacement.

(I found this link on the ccc tool, but I don't have ccc 4.)

Questions are:


How can I use CarbonCopyCloner 3.5.7 from the Single User Mode command line to update one of my full backups before I take the machine in for service?
If this can't be done from the command line with this version of CCC, how else could I back up all data before taking it in for service (from Single User mode)?
Boot to Single User Mode with one (empty) backup drive attached. Execute the indicated standard commands:


/sbin/fsck -fy
/sbin/mount -uw /
Get the disk identifier of the external backup drive:

gpt -r show disk1 #(or disk2, disk3) search for the proper drive with gpt because *diskutil* won't work in SU mode

Mount the external drive's main partition (e.g. disk1s2) to /Volumes/externaldrive and create a new folder:

mkdir /Volumes/externaldrive
/sbin/mount -o nosuid -w -t hfs /dev/disk1s2 /Volumes/externaldrive
mkdir /Volumes/externaldrive/new_backupdir

Backup your main drive with rsync e.g:

rsync -aE --exclude='/Volumes' / /Volumes/externaldrive/new_backupdir


If you want to backup only the folder /Users modify the rsync command accordingly. Please check man rsync for the appropriate options. Some of the useful options (like -v) don't work in SU mode - at least for me. Depending on your system, the options set and the excluded items the rsync command will yield some minor errors.




This backup isn't bootable per se. You may create a bootable backup though by backing up to the root of the external drive and blessing the appropriate boot.efi.