I've tried Clone X in the past, but I downloaded the version 3 trial today to see if it had improved. Much to my dismay, it has not.

The first problem I noticed is that the installer DMG contains two PDF manuals. One claims to be French and the other English. However, both files are actually French. There is no English manual in spite of one PDF saying it is in English! I might expect this from immature software, but Clone X is not at version 3!

I then launched the app (not knowing what recommendations the manual has since I cannot read French). The interface seemed self-explanatory enough, so I thought I would do a test clone from my internal 120GB hard drive to my external 120GB firewire drive. I have made this type of clone before using Apple's Disk Utility in OS X. I had hoped Clone X might be faster, as Clone X, by its very name, is supposed to excel at cloning. However, it took well over 3 hours to clone just under 100GB of data (on my 1.7GHz G4 Mac).

I suppose I can live with a 3 hour cloning time for 100GB of data, but I had hoped that Clone X would make me a perfect clone. Disk Utility does a pretty good job, but some of my applications (like little Snitch and Adobe apps) sense that the disk has been cloned and then I have to re-register again. Sadly, Clone X makes a worse clone than Apple's Disk Utility. Upon completing the clone operation, I was presented with an Errors dialog. Clone X told me there were a total of 2193 errors. It then listed the following data, which I really don't know what to make of since the following numbers total more than 2193:

On File: 1493
On Folders: 6992
Others: 7

It then told me that Clone X couldn't set permissions on some files, couldn't modify some dates, and couldn't set correct file sizes -- which it says is a "critical error."

In light of the fact there is nothing fancy about my computer setup, I am greatly disappointed by this software. I would have expected a dedicated cloning application, especially at version 3.0, to have worked better than Apple's Disk Utility. But that is not the case with Clone X. And to think, this software costs nearly US$50!

User beware.