- Acronis True Image 2018. Acronis is a name well known in the Windows world, but less so to Mac users. True Image 18 is its personal backup solution and it supports backing up your data to a.
- There are many ways to clone a drive on Mac OS X, but none quite as simple and effective as Carbon Copy Cloner.
Aug 27,2019 • Filed to: Solve Problems with Mac • Proven solutions
Apple claims that its Mac OS is fully equipped to assist its users for day-to-day PC activities, and they seem to have proven the same over the years. Since Mac users save a lot of important data on it, it is necessary to keep all such information secure. Mac Disk Utility does exactly that with the help of its “Restore” option. This function basically teaches you how to Clone a Mac’s Drive with Disk Utility.
Another possible use of this hard drive imaging software is to take a backup copy of the system. Even for a new or an old PC, after you install all the required applications and software, you can make a disc image of that hard drive and keep on an external drive. The Mac is still the best device for serious photo editing, so you need some serious photo editing apps to make an impact. The built-in Photos app on Mac offers several useful photo editing tools. You can crop, adjust lighting and color, set the white balance, add filters, remove unwanted blemishes, and a few more things.
In this article, learn how to copy all the data and clone a Mac’s Drive (internal/external) easily. Read and know more about Mac Disk Utility, its “Restore” function, how to clone a Mac’s Drive with Disk Utility and a simple way to recover your Mac’s Drive.
Part 1: Why You Need to Clone a Mac’s Drive?
“What is the need to clone a Mac’s Drive?” This thought must have crossed your mind atlas once while using Mac. To be precise, cloning of hard drives protects your important data which is under possible risk of physical destructions, loss, etc.
No matter how new or of what quality your hard drive is, you cannot say for sure that it will last forever and never crash or suffer from a system failure. Old hard drive or one suffering from mechanical, firmware or electrical error can permanently destroy your data, such as photos, documents, videos, music, and other files. Also, if important personal documents and business files are misplaced in the process, retrieving them is next to impossible.
Therefore, to prevent these and many more situations that may arise due to data loss, we recommend that you always know how to Clone a Mac’s Drive using Disk Utility. Mac Disk Utility and its “Restore” functions can keep your data, important information and files secure by literally copying it from your Mac Drive.
Difference Between Time Machine Backup and Cloning Hard Drive
If you’re wondering whether to use Time Machine or Mac Disk Utility to clone a Mac’s Drive, let us clear the confusion for you. Time Machine is a built-in application to back up and make an up-to-date copy of the data you save on the Mac. Its unique feature is that it makes real-time backups to recover files easily whenever needed. When set-up for the first time, Time Machine performs a full backup of the Mac and its contents. Time Machine keeps, hourly, daily and monthly backups all categorized separately.
If Time Machine can do so much, then why consider using Mac Disk Utility?
To start the discussion, Mac Disk Utility is free and also comes built-in with every Mac OS version. It has various new features that makes it more suitable than the Time Machine. Say for example, its “Restore” option does something what is called block copy and make the entire cloning process swifter. It is also capable of making an almost cut to cut exact copy of the contents of the Drive. No important files, documents or data is left behind using Mac Disk Utility. It works in blocks and does not involve file to file transfer.
Some changes have been introduced in the Mac Disk Utility toolkit which makes more accurate cloning and copying data from the Drive.
Part 2: How to Clone Mac’s Drive using Disk Utility?
Curious to know how to clone a Mac’s Drive with Disk Utility? Follow these simple steps and you’re good to go:
- Open Mac Disk Utility on your Mac from Utilities or Applications.
- Click “Erase” from the top of the Disk Utility interface.
- Now chose a media on left panel to make it your backup drive.
- At the drop down list which has “Format” options, choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Then hit “Erase” again and wait for the drive to remount on Mac.
- Then at Mac Disk Utility interface, click “Restore”.
- Now comes the tricky bit. Select the target drive, drag it and drop it at the “Source” field.
- Now drag and drop the destination Disk/Drive and leave it at the “Destination” field.
- Hit “Restore” once and for all. The contents of the drive will be copied and saved on the destination drive.
Part 3: How to Recover Mac’s Drive Data?
What does one do if some data is lost during cloning the mac’s Drive? Don’t worry. The loss isn’t permanent and the destroyed data can be recovered with the help of Recoverit for Mac. It is a recovery tool for MacBook, iMac, Hard Drives, Flash Drives, Memory Cards, phones, cameras and camcorders. It can instantly retrieve the lost contents from the Mac Drive and provide reliable data recovery solutions. It can recover documents, images, videos, audio files, emails and archives files.
The steps given below will help you use Recoverit for Mac to recover Mac’s Drive:
- Download, install and launch Recoverit hard drive recovery software. Now choose the target drive where the data gets lost, and click 'Start' to recover lost data.
- And then the data recovery tool will set in motion an all-around scan to search the lost files.
- Finally, you can preview the whole scanned results, select the ones which need to be restored, click “Recover” as shown below and save the recovered data in another drive/disk to keep it secure for future.
Conclusion
Bottom-line, we have attempted to answer a commonly asked question on online forums, i.e., how to clone a Mac’s Drive with Disk Utility. We hope you will find this red useful and now be able to clone your Mac’s drive and keeps its contents safe.
Also, the Recoverit drive data recovery toolkit is a safe, effective and trustworthy medium to retrieve your lost documents and file. So go ahead and follow the instructions in this guide to clone a Mac’s drive or recover hard drive data deleted accidentally during its process.
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There are many ways to clone a drive on Mac OS X, but none quite as simple and effective as Carbon Copy Cloner. It's our top pick for disk cloning utilities because it gets the job done any which way you need.
Carbon Copy Cloner
Free Clone Tool For Mac
Platform: Mac OS X
Price:Free $40
Download Page
Features
- Create an exact clone of any disk
- Create a bootable backup of your Mac OS X boot drive
- Easily migrate files from one disk to another
- Supports block-level disk-to-disk clones (this basically means it copies everything faster, as file-to-file copy can take a bit longer)
- After the first backup, you can sync changes to quickly update your backups
- Archive old and deleted versions of files
- Back up to a hard drive, network share, or disk image
- Schedule backup tasks hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly
- Configure backups to occur when you plug in the backup drive
- Back up to another Mac on your network or somewhere else on the internet
- Super-simple interface makes it easy to use
- 'Cloning coach' helps new users learn to make the right choices when cloning a drive
- Disk image backups can be encrypted
- Backups are compatible with Apple's Migration Assistant, so you can use a cloned drive to migrate to a new Mac
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Where It Excels
Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) is great because it's easy to configure, it gets the job done quickly, and you can pretty much set it and forget it. Cloning a disk can be as simple as selected a source disk and destination—whether that destination is another hard drive, a disk image, or a network share. From there you just click the 'Clone' button and CCC does all the work. If you don't want to backup an entire drive, however, CCC can handle incremental and partial backups as well. It can also sync files between two drives, and you can choose to archive old or deleted files or just keep the backups completely identical. If you want your disk cloning and backups to be almost completely hands-free, you can schedule backups or tell CCC to start the backup process when a specific disk is connected to your machine. Basically, whatever you need it to do it can handle and it will get the job done fast and easy.
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Where It Falls Short
CCC really has no downsides. Unless you like the crazy interface and restore features of Time Machine, or prefer something with a more simplified online backup option (like Crashplan or one of these syncing file services), maybe you'll want to try something else. But CCC can backup to drives anywhere on else on the internet and you can use backups to restore old versions of files—just not as elegantly as you might with other software. Everything it does it does well, so there's little to complain about.
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The main issue we now have with Carbon Copy Cloner is its price. It went from free to $40, which is kind of a big jump. It's still our favorite app, but we'd like to see it somewhere around half the price. As much as we love it, it just doesn't do enough to justify $40. The upside, however, is you can still download the older version for free. While it isn't supported in Mountain Lion, it appears to be working fine. This may not be the case forever, but for now it it isn't a problem. If that ever changes, we hope the price drops to something a bit more reasonable because we'd love to support the software.
The Competition
Super Duper is probably the most obvious alternative to CCC, but it'll cost your $28 if you want to unlock all its features. It is a capable drive cloner free of charge, but to get features like scheduling, scripting, smart updates, and more, you'll need to pay the fee. We feel this alone makes CCC a clearly better choice, but some prefer Super Duper and you may, too.
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Best Clone App For Mac
ChronoSync will run you $40 and give you a very comprehensive feature set. While it's certainly capable of cloning and syncing drives, it's definitely a full-on backup utility that can handle things like complex file comparisons, data filters, and pretty much anything you could need. If you need a backup and cloning app that can do practically everything, ChronoSync should do the trick.
Disk Utility, which is built in to Mac OS X (just see your Hard Drive -> Applications -> Utilities folder), is technically capable of cloning a drive. While it copies file-by-file, rather than block-by-block, it can generally get the job done so long as you're not trying to clone the disk you booted from. While we'd highly recommend using CCC instead, seeing as it's also free, if you're in a pinch and can't download another app this is an option that will always be available. So is the dd command, which is a better choice if you're comfortable messing around in the OS X command line.
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Free Clone Tool
Got any other disk cloning apps you love? Share 'em in the comments!
Lifehacker's App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.
Clone Tool For Mac
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