We talk a
lot about backing up your Windows hard drive to prevent data loss and to speed
up recovery but we rarely mention Mac. While Apple computers are more stable
than Windows can be, it isn’t immune to failure or to faults. Today I’m going
to show you how to create a bootable clone of your Mac hard drive.
Here at
Dave’s Computers, we deal with lots of Macs in various states of repair. With
many years’ experience with Mac from all generations, it’s good to see the
hardware and software develop steadily. That said, some faults still make it through
and Macs do have a few foibles we need to manage.
Cloning a
hard drive is the process of taking an exact copy, bit by bit until it is
completely duplicated on another drive. It is different from copying files, as
it includes the file system, operating system, drivers and every single bit and
byte of data. It is an exact one-for-one copy of your drive and means you can
switch drives and be up and running again immediately if something happens to
your main drive.
MacOS has a
built-in utility that can handle this process so you don’t need to buy or
download any extra software. What you will need is another hard drive of the
same type and the same size or larger. I suggest using an external drive but
you can use what you like.
Here’s how
to clone a Mac hard drive:
Typically
you would reverse that to restore files from an external backup to your main
drive. In this instance we have flipped that so we make a full clone backup of
your main Mac drive.
The process
can take a while depending on the speed of your Mac and what kind of hard drive
you’re using. If you’re using SSD, the process can be done in a few minutes. If
you’re using an HDD, it will take longer.
Once
complete, you can boot from your external drive by hitting Option when the Mac
boots to access the boot switcher. As long as your external drive is connected
and powered on, you can choose to boot from it and work on your computer as
normal or restore your main drive as you normally would using Restore.
Cloning a
Mac hard drive is surprisingly easy yet is something not all Mac owners know
how to do. If you take a copy of your boot drive today, you may not need our
data recovery services. So what are you waiting for?