A clone of your Mac is essentially a backup of all the data you can make bootable, so when you connect the disk to another Mac, you just reboot and carry on from where you left off.
Cloning your Mac’s main drive is a great way to protect yourself against potential problems when, for example, you might be installing a new version of macOS — especially if it’s still in beta. But clones can also be of use during travel or business trips, if you’re worried that your Mac might get lost, stolen or damaged.
Oct 28, 2016 - I want to clone my entire hard drive to a new hard drive or a new. To do a full-volume clone is when you have purchased a new Mac and you.
If you need to recover files from a failing system, you can clone the whole drive and then recover files from the clone, removing the possibility that the drive will fail completely before your files are recovered.
A clone backup differs from the now popular incremental backup in that it creates a snapshot of your Mac that is preserved for as long as you want it, whereas incremental backups update themselves at regular intervals.
How to create a clone of your Mac
There are a few things you need in order to clone your Mac and use it as a backup. First, you need an external hard drive or SSD with a volume that’s clean and empty, which means it should either be brand new or completely erased beforehand.
Next, you’ll need software to create the clone. There are several applications that are available for Macs that you can use. We recommend going with Disk Drill. Disk Drill can help you recover data from a failed drive and allows you to create byte-for-byte copies of a disk and save them as a disk image. In other words — clone your Mac.
Finally, you need a safe place to store your clone — a backup is no good if you can’t find it when you need it.
Before you start
If you have a regular backup routine, it’s a good idea to run one before you start the process of cloning your Mac. It sounds daft to run a backup just before you create a backup, but it’s always better to be safe than sorry.
If you’re using a disk that’s been used before, you’ll need to erase it completely to make it ready for the clone. We’ll assume you’re going to use the whole disk as a single volume.
Erase the drive and create a disk image
Plug the external hard drive into your Mac, and launch Disk Utility. Go to the Utilities folder in Applications and double-click on Disk Utility to open it.
Erase the drive. Click on the external drive in the sidebar and then the Erase tab. In most cases, the format will automatically be set to macOS Extended and the scheme to GUID Partition Map. You can leave it at that. If you’re running macOS Mojave and will only use the drive with a Mac using Mojave, you can choose APFS from the Format menu. Give your drive a name and click Erase.
Then open Setapp desktop app and launch Disk Drill. If you haven’t already installed Disk Drill, get Setapp account and install the app.
Create a disk image of your drive
- When Disk Drill opens, click Backup in the toolbar and choose Backup into DMG Image from the menu. In the next window, click OK, Let’s Do It.
- Now, choose your Mac’s boot disk in the main window and click Backup. You’ll be asked where you want to save the disk image.
- Navigate to the external drive you’ve just erased and select Save.
Disk Drill will now create an exact copy of your boot drive as a disk image, saved on the external drive.
Once the disk image has been created, you can double-click on it to mount it in the Finder. It will then be treated like any other volume by macOS and you can drag and drop files from it to your main drive. That’s fine if you only lose a few files and folders and need to recover them, but what if your boot drive fails or you need to recover the whole disk from the image?
Restore the clone
You can’t boot a Mac from a disk image, but you can restore the clone to your Mac’s boot drive if you need to. Here’s how.
- Shut down your Mac
- Restart in recovery mode. Restart your Mac while holding down the Command and “R” keys.
- Erase your boot drive. Click on Disk Utilities in the Utilities application and then Erase. If the disk image you’re restoring from has macOS High Sierra installed, choose APFS from the format menu, otherwise, choose macOS Extended (Journaled). Give it a name and click Erase.
- Restore the disk image. Still in Disk Utility, click on the drive you just erased. Now go to the File menu and choose Restore. Click the Image button and navigate to the disk image you created in Disk Drill. Then Restore.
Alternatively, if you know beforehand that you’re going to need to boot from the clone, choose Create Boot Drive and then Boot Drive for data recovery instead of Backup when you've created the disk image of your drive.
Recover files from disk image
If you don’t need to completely replace your Mac’s startup disk, but need to recover files from a disk image — perhaps because you created the image from a failing drive that has now failed completely — you also can do that in Disk Drill.
- Mount the drive. Double-click on the disk image in the Finder to mount it.
- Recover data in Disk Drill. Select the mounted volume in Disk Drill’s main window and click Recover. Follow the on-screen instructions to scan the volume, identify and recover the files you need. Remember that you should never recover files to a failing hard drive, so choose a destination that you know is stable.
All the ways to clone
You now know how to clone your Mac so you can use it as a backup for files and folders, as well as to recover files and, if you need to, boot from the clone and restore the image to your Mac’s startup disk. Let’s hope you never need it, but, if the tragedy comes around, at least you are prepared.
Cloning of Mac hard drive using Stellar Drive Clone
Stellar Drive Clone software is used to create an exact replica of the Mac volumes and hard drives. It supports cloning to another hard drive, volume, or folder. You need to perform the below mentioned steps to clone Mac OS X hard drive.
- Start ‘Stellar Drive Clone’ application.
- The main interface is displayed with ‘Clone’ option on the left pane as shown below.
- Click ‘Clone’ from the left pane of the main interface.
- The next screen provides you an option to clone the disk or volume by selecting the source and destination drive. The Disk Clone comes in two options; ‘Clone without resizing’ and ‘Clone with resizing’.
- Select a source drive and a preferred destination drive and click ‘Continue’ as shown below.
- To clone a volume, select a source volume to be cloned and a preferred destination volume. Click ‘Continue’ as shown below.
- Once the clone is created, you can restore the data from a folder or volume, which was created using this option.
- Go to the Restore option and select the folder containing the clone of a volume and a desired destination volume. Click ‘Continue’ to restore the data as shown below.
Overview
You can now easily clone your Mac hard drive based on HFS and FAT file systems. Cloning creates an exact replica of the Mac hard drive that can be readily accessed. The process of creating a clone is a very challenging process, as it requires copying hidden and in-use files on the system.
The cloning process is different from the standard process of copying, and should be performed using a professional and trusted tool. Stellar Drive Clone is a complete Mac backup tool that creates a clone or image of the Mac-based hard drives. Disk image files can be used anytime to restore the data, in any case of data loss situations.
However, in case you are using the Time Machine Application to backup your data, you might need to clone your hard drive as well. If your main drive fails, it could be a life savior option to boot your Mac again. There are various other reasons why you might need a clone. For example, while your Mac hard drive is getting upgraded or fixed due to some reason, and you have an emergency to use your system, you can use the clone copy.
Note: While creating the clone copy, you need to make sure that your system is free from any kind of issues and errors. This would ensure an error-free clone. In addition, the system should be in the ideal state without any applications running or open.
Common Uses of Cloning
- At times, it happens that the internal drive of your Mac is dead and you are unable to get access to the data inside. If you have the BOOTABLE clone with the same content, you can regain access to the OS X and all the data from the clone.
- Cloning is widely used to set up new computers that require the same set of settings and programs to be installed. This avoids the need to install individual applications on each system.
- While upgrading to a new or larger hard drive, disk cloning might be required. In addition, you might need cloning while upgrading to the faster Solid State Drive SSD.
- Cloning can be used to take a complete system backup including the operating system and installed software to avoid any future data loss situations.
- To perform system recovery in case of a crash.
The Cloning Process
As already discussed, cloning requires a direct bit to bit copying of data from the original drive to the cloned drive. The data include the operating system files and hidden directory files that need to be copied. Once the clone is created, there is no functional difference between the old drive and the cloned drive. However, the only possible difference possible could be the hardware configuration and the driver incompatibility if it is used on a different system.
Destination Drive
Cloning a drive requires you to select a location to save the cloned image. You can save the clone image directly to the system disk or to an external drive. In either of the case, it is required to have drive of equal or larger capacity of the data that needs to be cloned. In case of an external drive, they can be connected directly to the system using a USB connection.
Clean Up Your Files
Before cloning the hard drive, you need to ensure that the clone is free from any unwanted files and applications. You might need to clone a hard drive that contains programs or files that are not required. In addition, there might be something you wanted to delete but you forgot. In either of the case, you need to clean up all junk and unwanted files.
Making the Clone
While making the clone, you need to ensure that there is no application running or any other program open that could affect the cloning process. In case of creating a clone on an external drive; connect the destination drive first before launching the tool with which you are creating clone
![How to clone mac hdd to ssd How to clone mac hdd to ssd](/uploads/1/2/5/2/125291528/330767742.png)
Clone Maintenance
Once the clone is created, any changes made in the files or applications of the original drive would not be reflected on the original drive. In order to ensure an up to date backup of the system all the time, you need to schedule the cloning process at regular intervals. In case you have saved your clone on an external drive, you need to keep it in a safe place away from any possible chance of getting damaged.
Final Words
You should at-least have 2 backup strategy for Mac hard disk drives. One Mac backup should be facilitated by the inbuilt Time Machine application while the other should be done by Mac cloning utility.