Attack of the Clone: Cloning your Mac HardDrive
Everyone needs to backup, and most sufficiently geeky individuals – like me – have strong opinions on best practices. Here are my musings on backing up by cloning.
Better then Cloned Sheep
My preferred method of backing up is Cloning. By Cloning your main drive you create a bootable copy of your computer, down to all the technical minutia like permissions, preferences, and keychains.
How To:
- Get an External Hard Drive;
- Head to “Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility”;
- Click on your new external disk and then the “Partition” tab;
- Click on your External Drive and partition a space equal to your computers disk capacity;
- Click on the “Restore” Tab;
- Drag your computers Hard Drive icon from the right pane to the “Source” text field;
- Drag your new external partition into the “Destination” text field.;
- Check “Erase Destination” (This will make sure everything goes smoothly);
- Click the “Restore” button and go grab a cocktail, this will take some time.
The More the Better
I keep two clones per computer at any point in time.
Clone 1: Cloneing your drive right after installing your OS and any basic software is a best practice that will save you hours when you choose to shed your year old system and start anew by reinstalling OSX.
Clone 2: Keeping a catastrophic clone right before you do fresh install or major system change will ensure that all your data is perfectly safe, and at worst your can fully revert back.
Benefits:
In hard times, you can boot into a clone. This means you have a fully useable operating system sitting outside your computer. All you data, all your programs work just like they did when you originally made the clone.
Worst comes to worst, Revert. You can use this method in reverse to revert your computer back to a clone.
No hassle nuking. Having a nuke clone (a clone of your system right after a fresh install with all the software you know you are going to have to reinstall) will save you the time and trouble of rummaging for serial numbers or going through install processes when you want to reinstall your OS.
Safe Data Data on a clone is just as safe as it was on your computer, If you have FileVault settings activated, those settings will persist onto the clone. Meaning your user directory will require a username as password to get at.
BONUS: Optical Disk and DMG Cloneing. OSX install disks, iLife, Adobe Products and important DMG images, Can and should be backed up onto a hard drive. Hard Drives are harder to destroy or lose, and in many cases are faster then optical reading. CD clones using this method will act just like the original disk.
NOTE: This will not work for copy protected disks or movies. I suggest cloning these things rather then imaging them because it makes them bootable, and is faster and less memory intensive to mount.
You might also like
Comments are closed.
