Do you need to clone your Mac for generating a bootable copy of your hard drive? This process is called as Cloning. You can employ two popular methods to achieve your purpose with programs such as SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner.
How to Clone Your Mac
You may need to clone your Mac hard drive in many cases. This process produces an exact copy of your hard drive that is bootable from your MAC. It will act as a backup of your main drive.
There could be various reasons for cloning or making a copy of your hard drive such as you need to upgrade your hard drive, or working off an external hard disk for some reason. If your MAC is in the shop for repair, and you have to work on some other MAC then your backup disk will serve your purpose. It is also a good practice to back up all of your data.
Before You Clone Your MAC
- An external hard disk that is connected with the aid of the dock or caddy.
- SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner program.
- Format the disk using the Disk Utility.
Preparing Your Mac Clone Using Disk Utility
- In the Utilities folder, double click the disk utility icon.
- Click on the drive icon that acts as your clone drive in the sidebar.
- Hit the Erase tab.
- You need to make sure that MAC OS Extended (Journaled) is selected from the Format menu.
- You need to click on the Erase button.
- You need to verify that you want to erase the disk.
- When you are done, you will see a new hard drive icon appearing on the desktop.
How to Clone your Hard Drive MAC Using SuperDuper!
- Once you have installed SuperDuper!, double click on app icon.
- If it is not selected already, select the hard drive of your MAC in the pop-up menu residing next to the Copy.
- Select the hard drive used as target in the “to” popup menu.
- You need to make sure that using popup menu reads “Backup-all files”.
- Click the Copy Now button
- SuperDuper! app will now ask for the administrator password to continue.
It will then copy all of your files onto the new hard drive. You can create a clone of your hard disk if you are not registered. If you pay $27 registration fee, you will unlock plenty of additional features.
How to Clone your MAC Using Carbon Copy Cloner
- Once installed, double click on the Carbon Copy Cloner app.
- Hit the Source popup menu and select the volume of your MAC boot from the list of local volumes.
- You need to select your clone drive from the Destination menu.
- Hit the Clone button
- You can also create the recovery partition on the target hard drive. Use the built-in tools to create it if you desire. This feature is useful if you are creating a replacement hard disk.
As it is obvious from this tutorial of how simple it is to clone your MAC computer. It is a straightforward method of creating the exact copy of the MAC’s internal hard drive. Use this to create a bootable drive for the future!