Computer back up advice is often accompanied by the suggestion to clone your main drive in addition to daily incremental back up. We here at Unplggd have also suggested cloning as a necessary part of any back up program. The common advice to is to use a program like CarbonCopy when the built in Disk Utility will clone a hard drive just fine.
Disk Utility makes is extremely easy to clone a hard drive.
- Format Your Destination Drive: Plug in your disk to your computer and open up Disk Utility. Select the erase tab and and format your hard drive into a partition large enough to hold your data.
- Use the Restore Function to Clone: You will want to drag your main disk from your desktop to the source space. Then select your newly formatted disk as the destination, also make sure to deselect the erase destination check box below the destination space.
- Bootup the Cloned Drive: With your newly cloned harddrive reboot your mac and hold down option. This will bring up the boot manager allowing you to select your newly cloned drive. If everything boots normally and function then your drive is properly cloned.
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Comments (7)
Unfortunately, Disk Utility won't do an incremental clone the way that CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper! will do. CCC and SD! are additionallly useful for having a working, up-to-date clone of the system in case the hard drive dies in the middle of something.
Agree with jdechko.
Using Disk Utility is all well and good but when your week gets really busy sometimes you'll forget to do a clone of your computer. And we all agree that having a backup is always a good practice. CC and SD have scheduling features that make weekly or even daily backups for you AND in a fraction of the time it takes to do a full clone using Disk Utility.
So doing it this way isn't really the "Easy Way" as the title suggests.
why not use Time Machine? it handles incremental backups, lets you restore in the event of a crash/reformat, and it's built in. what's the big benefit to cloning?
@westendRIOT: Time Machine is a great option to doing incremental backups however:
1. If your main hard drive goes down, you can't immediately start up from the backup that Time Machine creates. You will need to replace your main hard drive, then restore from Time Machine.
2. In some cases, when you boot up from the new hard drive just restored from Time Machine, some of your applications will have forgotten all the serial numbers.
3. Restoring from Time Machine can take hours especially if running from Time Capsule.
The benefits of cloning are:
1. Speed. You are basically up and running once you reboot your computer from the external drive that has your clone. In most homes, the computer is the hub of all your media and communication (music, pictures, movies and email), having it down for an extended period isn't an option.
2. If you have CC or SD schedule a daily clone of your computer you can be up and running with minimal data loss.
3. It wont break any of the serial numbers in your applications.
4. If you are extremely paranoid individual, you can take an exact clone of your computer with you every day just in case someone breaks into your place and steals your computer or theres a fire in your home.
I use Carbon Copy Cloner and clone my MB Pro to a spare 250 gb drive in a USB enclosure. It's bootable in case my 500 gb drive dies. I also make sure that anything that I download and want to keep is stored on both of my external drives as redundant backups. That way, only the basic operating system and support files, and other daily-use files (such as documents) are stored on my 250 gb backup drive, and large files are stored separately.
Question: can the same method be used to clone a time machine drive?
I backup my iMac to a 1TB Time Maching HDD, but my Aperture vault only lives on the TM drive (didn't want to risk choking my ~500 GB internal HDD down the line). So, if I only clone my internal HDD, I still don't have a back-up of my Aperture vault.
I'd rather just keep using Time Machine and make an occasional clone of it to keep in my fire safe for worst-case scenario - if it can be cloned just as easily, problem solved, right?