As the number of users has climbed high in a few recent years, our data needs more protection than before.  Mac drive imaging and cloning are two most widespread and useful modes of protecting the data stored on Mac volumes. You might be thinking how to clone a Mac drive? Do you need any cloning software for Mac to protect your data? Well, Mac OS X has built-in Disk Utility that is able to perform several tasks associated with the hard drive and individual volumes. These tasks consist of verify disk, repair disk, verify disk permissions, repair disk permissions, create/delete a volume, resize existing volumes, image Mac drives, restore drive image, and even clone Mac volumes. Cloning a volume in Mac creates a carbon copy of the selected volume.

Moreover, using Disk Utility, you can even create a bootable clone of the entire Mac drive to another drive (both internal and external USB drive) with equal or larger in capacity.  The clone drive can be used instead of the original drive in the event of a disaster. Following is the step-by-step process of cloning a Mac volume containing user’s essential data for backup purpose using disk utility:

• Open Disk Utility from the Dock bar on the desktop
• (Alternatively, click Go menu, select Applications in the context menu, open Utilities folder, and double-click Disk Utility).
• Highlight the target Mac volume in the left pane of Disk Utility window.
• Go to the Restore tab in the right pane.
• Drag and drop the target Mac volume to the Source filed.
• Similarly, drag and drop the destination Mac volume to the destination filed.

(Make sure you have chosen the correct volumes)

• Click Restore button to start cloning.

Once the process is completed, you will see a copy of the selected Mac volumes at the destination. Although drive cloning does not involve much user attention, people have been complaining about Disk Utility’s operations and the complexity they face while working with it. Therefore, to avoid any complex and unfavourable situation, it is recommended to use a cloning software for Mac instead. In reality, what do you want in a good cloning software? It should be

• Replicating the selected drive efficiently
• Able to work on your current Partition Map Scheme
• Supporting the file system of your Mac volumes
• Cloning a volume to another volume, folder, and even to a remote drive.

Internet facilitates downloading and purchasing several drive cloning tools for Mac machines. You can also find a good cloning software featuring simple user interface and reliable functioning.

As the number of users has climbed high in a few recent years, our data needs more protection than before. Mac drive imaging and cloning are two most widespread and useful modes of protecting the data stored on Mac volumes. You might be thinking how to clone a Mac drive? Do you need any cloning software for Mac to protect your data? Well, Mac OS X has built-in Disk Utility that is able to perform several tasks associated with the hard drive and individual volumes. These tasks consist of verify disk, repair disk, verify disk permissions, repair disk permissions, create/delete a volume, resize existing volumes, image Mac drives, restore drive image, and even clone Mac volumes. Cloning a volume in Mac creates a carbon copy of the selected volume.

Moreover, using Disk Utility, you can even create a bootable clone of the entire Mac drive to another drive (both internal and external USB drive) with equal or larger in capacity. The clone drive can be used instead of the original drive in the event of a disaster. Following is the step-by-step process of cloning a Mac volume containing user’s essential data for backup purpose using disk utility:

• Open Disk Utility from the Dock bar on the desktop

(Alternatively, click Go menu, select Applications in the context menu, open Utilities folder, and double-click Disk Utility).

• Highlight the target Mac volume in the left pane of Disk Utility window.

• Go to the Restore tab in the right pane.

• Drag and drop the target Mac volume to the Source filed.

• Similarly, drag and drop the destination Mac volume to the destination filed.

(Make sure you have chosen the correct volumes)

• Click Restore button to start cloning.

Once the process is completed, you will see a copy of the selected Mac volumes at the destination. Although drive cloning does not involve much user attention, people have been complaining about Disk Utility’s operations and the complexity they face while working with it. Therefore, to avoid any complex and unfavorable situation, it is recommended to use a cloning software for Mac instead. In reality, what do you want in a good cloning software? It should be

• Replicating the selected drive efficiently

• Able to work on your current Partition Map Scheme

• Supporting the file system of your Mac volumes

• Cloning a volume to another volume, folder, and even to a remote drive.

Internet facilitates downloading and purchasing several drive cloning tools for Mac machines. You can also find a good cloning software featuring simple user interface and reliable functioning.

Hard drive cloning refers to the process of copying the contents a hard drive to another drive so that the generated replica can be used to restore both your data and programs whenever a disaster strikes. You can clone your hard drive to an SSD. SSD (acronym for Solid State Drive) is a high-performance data storage device that uses Integrated Circuit (IC) chips for permanent data storage. Unlike a typical hard drive containing a revolving disc called platter, SSD has embedded components, such as a ‘DRAM’ or ‘EEPROM’ memory boards, a ‘CPU’, a ‘Memory BUS board’, and a ‘Battery card’. Moreover, SSDs are used mostly where input/output time is vital, such as Servers.

An SSD does not slow down, thereby eliminating the need for defragmentation. Therefore, moving to an SSD is certainly a wise decision. You do not have to worry about the data stored on the current hard drive, as you can clone Mac drive to an SSD. Before going for cloning, first initialize the newly purchased SSD on the Mac machine.

• Launch Disk Utility (Applications-> Utilities folder) and attach the SSD to Mac using a USB cable.

Currently, Mac is not able to read this drive, and displays an initialize option to click.

• Now, you will see the drive in Disk Utility.

• Select this drive in the left pane, and simultaneously click the Partition tab in the right pane.

• Make sure the Partition Map Scheme is set to ‘GUID Partition Table’.

If not, click Options button below the drive structure and choose ‘GUID Partition Table’.

• In ‘Volume Scheme’ dropdown list, select the number of partitions to create.

• Specify the ‘Name’, ‘Format’, and ‘Size’ for each partition under ‘Volume Information’ area.

Make sure to select Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

• Click Apply to save the changes.

After all the desired changes are made, proceed with the below mentioned procedure to clone the primary hard drive.

Open Disk Utility to resize the primary hard drive partition according to that of the SSD (Do not resize the SSD).

Note: Make sure the hard drive is not encrypted with the FileVault. If it is, first decrypt the hard drive, and then resize it.

• Restart Mac from the recovery partition or with install disc, and hold down the Option key.

• Select “Recovery-10.x” or install disc.

• Select Disk Utility followed by the language.

• Select primary hard drive in Disk Utility, and simultaneously go to the ‘Restore’ tab.

• Now, drag the boot volume of the hard drive to the ‘Source’ field and a volume of the SSD to the ‘Destination’ field.

• Check ‘Erase Destination’ checkbox, if given.

• Click Restore.

After the process is finished, boot from the clone drive to ensure the cloning was successful (press and hold option key and choose the clone drive from the boot manager).

Imaging a volume in Mac refers to the process of replicating the internal structure and content of that volume. This process generates a file with .dmg extension that contains the overall data stored in the selected volume. Though drive imaging is a straight but slow process, you must have proper planning before initiating the action. Actually, the process is similar to taking a snapshot of the source volume.

Similarly, you can image Mac boot volume to restore your Mac machine in case of system crash. Moreover, you can even use this image (.dmg) file to boot multiple similar Mac machines without having the need to reformat and reinstall OS X. Let us go through a few simple steps involved in imaging a Mac boot volume.

Launch Disk Utility from the Dock bar (or follow Go-> Applications-> Utility folder-> Disk Utility)

Select the boot volume (Usually named as Macintosh HD) in the left pane of the opened window and click New Image option in the menu bar.

Specify the location to save this image (.dmg) file in the left most pane of the opened window (If required, you can create a new folder at this location to save the image)
Click Save to start the process

In reality, imaging was adopted in the world of computers to avoid data losses due to volume corruption, accidental deletion, inaccessibility etc. Apart from Disk Utility, various imaging software are available on the Internet, which facilitate creating image of individual Mac partition and even the complete hard drive at once. You can make a boot partition image in both Minimal Installation mode and with Installed applications. Once the process finishes, burn this image to a disc in order to boot a Mac machine.

Make sure you save this image at a secure location, such as an external hard drive or a network drive without sharing. However, size of the required storage media relies on that of the image to be stored. A good imaging software not only facilitates you to image Mac boot volume, but also lets you burn it to a DVD in order to revert to original state. To revert to the latest running state of the Mac, it is necessary to keep an updated image of its boot volume.

Practically a clone of something is its exact replica or mirror image, and just like human clones, you can create the clone of your hard drive as well. Having hard drive clone, not only enables you to overcome the devastating situations of data loss, but also lets you have the backup of your complete hard drive data before replacing it or disposing it off. That means, the clone of your hard drive contains all the data; even the system files. You can create the clone of your hard drive with the help of ‘Restore’ feature of ‘Disk Utility’. However, if you want more robust method for Mac cloning, then you can use a non-Apple tool as well. Let us understand this situation with a practical example.

Jerry – a college student wants to replace the hard drive of his Mac OS X with SSD. However, before replacing the drive, he wants its cloned backup so that he keeps his settings, preferences, and applications the same even after changing the drive. He could use his machine’s ‘Disk Utility’ for creating the clone, but as he has heard about some non-Apple cloning tools that are more robust and efficient methods, thus he wanted to use one.

For this, he searched over the Internet and found that there are professional Mac cloning utilities available online. After going through various blogs, articles, and websites, he found one tool which was recommended by various users. However, to ensure the security, he initially downloaded its free demo version. With demo he could view and check various options of this tool available for cloning, however for actual clone, he had to purchase the license of the software. Therefore, for actual clone, he bought the license and easily created the clone of his Mac hard drive on an external drive.

However, before replacing the hard drive with SSD, he checked this clone on his machine and it was working exactly the way his old machine was. That means, the clone was having all the original settings, applications, and programs of his machine. Therefore, with the help of the clone created through this efficient Mac cloning tool, he cloned his entire machine to SSD and started working.

In the same way, as Jerry cloned his entire hard drive contents to SSD, you too can create the clone of your hard drive to an external drive and start working normally. Most of these tools have really simple and intuitive user interface and are easy to use and does not let you feel that you are using something new.

Time Machine, Mac’s own backup tool, is a great advantage when it comes to fighting data disasters in times of crisis. At the same time, it is not always foolproof to overly depend on this backup tool, especially when you need to reduce downtime caused due to a disaster. In such situations, cloning your entire hard drive is far more reliable to get your system up and running within minutes.

Though technology is evolving at a fairly fast rate, hard drives are not immune to failures. The same can be said for Mac OS X drives. A disk clone provides you with a bootable copy of your hard drive. The clone replicates the entire content and structure of your physical drive. It includes your data files along with the operating system files and program files. Further, the ease of accessing data from a clone makes it a safer option to deal with any worst-case scenario of data loss on Mac computers.

You can benefit from hard drive cloning in the following ways:

Minimum or No Downtime

In the event of a hard disk crash, you can simply fit the clone into your Mac and get access to your precious data in no time.

Ease of Use

A Mac drive clone can also be used to restore select files that were deleted accidentally from your system. Further, if no compression was applied to the clone, you do not require decompressing or extracting.

Apple provides a handy tool ‘Disk Utility’ that can be used to clone your OS X hard drive to an external drive. Disk Utility can be accessed from the ‘/Applications/Utilities’ folder.

Follow the given steps to clone your local disk to any external drive using Apple’s Disk Utility:

NOTE: You need to first attach an external drive to your Mac. You need to boot from the Mac OS X Install CD to perform cloning of your boot hard disk.

• Insert the OS X Install CD/DVD into the CD/DVD drive and keep pressing ‘C’ as your Mac restarts.
• Choose the preffered language. At the Installer window, select ‘Utilities’, and then click ‘Disk Utility’.
• In the Disk Utility window, click the ‘Restore’ tab. Select your boot disk in the left pane and drag it into the ‘Source’ list box. Likewise, select your external disk and drag it into the ‘Destination’ list box.
• After selecting the source and destination, click ‘Restore’ button at the bottom. Once the process completes, you can use the external drive as clone.

A reliable alternative to Disk Utility is professional Mac hard disk cloning software. These tools allow you to create a sector-by-sector copy of your Mac hard drive. In addition, they facilitate imaging of Mac hard drives and logical volumes.

Having clone of your hard drive gives you an ease in work as you do not have fear of losing your precious data in any case of disk disaster. Clone is basically mirror image of your hard drive content on another drive that gives you fully operational and portable backup of entire hard drive data. You can create the clone of your Mac hard drive with the help of its efficient utility named as ‘Disk Utility’. By following the below mentioned steps of your ‘Disk Utility’, you can easily perform hard disk cloning:

• Start up with the Mac OS X installation disk. During the startup hold down the ‘C’ key until your Mac starts. Now from ‘Utilities’ menu select ‘Disk Utility’.
• From the ‘Disk Utility’ interface, select ‘Restore’ tab and provide the source drive and the destination drive. From the bottom uncheck the option for ‘Erase Destination’.
• Now click ‘Restore’ button to create the clone of source drive on the destination drive.

In this way your clone disk is ready to be used, restart your machine with the clone to check whether it is working fine or not. However, one precaution that you have to observe while creating the clone is to back up the data of your destination drive as the source drive data overwrites everything on the destination while cloning. Hence with this precautionary note, you can create the perfect clone of your Mac hard drive with ‘Disk Utility’.

Despite the efficiency of ‘Disk Utility’ it has some flaws as well. You cannot schedule the cloning task with ‘Disk Utility’. Moreover, it does not let you resize the volumes on destination drive to utilize the unused space as well as you cannot create the bootable disk of your machine with the ‘Disk Utility’. To overcome the flaws of this reliable inbuilt utility of Mac, there are various commercial hard disk cloning utilities available.

An efficient Mac cloning utility has many advance and better options than ‘Disk Utility’. You can schedule the cloning process, apply end task activities, resize volumes on the destination drive, restore data from folder or image, and create bootable DVD to boot your machine in various cases of machine failure. Apart from these features a reliable Mac cloning tool gives you option to create image of your Mac volume or entire Mac hard drive and restore volume from a folder or image file.

You can select either of the two options, however professional hard disk cloning is more customized and advanced method for cloning your hard drive.

Cloning is basically a process of creating exact replica of an object and clone is the mirror image of that object. You can create the clone of your hard drive as well. The hard drive clone not only contains all the data of your hard drive, instead it also consists of the Operating System (OS). Let us take an example of Mac OS X. The clone of your Mac OSX hard drive is its bootable copy, which can be used to create the mirror image of your Mac. However, you may think why you should create the replica of your hard drive, especially Mac as it is one of the robust machines that rarely crash. Well, having clone not only saves you from machine crash, but it has some other advantages as well:

• Portable Copy of Your Mac: Suppose, you are going for some vacation, but you do not want to carry your heavy Mac, however on the other hand you know that you may need your Mac there for some task. In such situation, if you have clone of your Mac on an external hard drive, then you can take the external drive with you, which is comparatively lighter and easier to carry.
• Complete/Bootable Backup of your Mac: Having clone you need not to worry about the data loss at all. Whether it is machine crash or hard drive damage, you always have complete bootable backup of your Mac OS X.
• An Effective Way to Have a Reliable Testing Machine: Hard drive clone gives you the flexibility to test any new application or software on it. So that if you find any flaws in the application or if the downloaded tool is a malware, then you will not lose your data as you have tested them on the clone only.

By far you must be clear why you should maintain the clone of your Mac hard drive, or what advantages you get, if you have bootable copy of your Mac hard drive. You can use your Mac’s inbuilt utility i.e. ‘Disk Utility’ for creating the clone of your hard drive. The ‘Restore’ tab of the ‘Disk Utility’ is there to help you t o create the exact replica of your Mac based hard drive.

Since cloning requires a destination drive on which the content of your source drive are being copied, thus the destination drive must be of large size than your source drive. Moreover, you should backup everything that is on the destination drive as entire data on destination is being overwritten and thus is lost. Apart from this, if you create the clone of your hard drive with ‘Disk Utility’, then you can not utilize the extra space available on your destination drive, if it has.

To overcome these flaws of ‘Disk Utility’ for clone, you can use an efficient non-Apple utility to clone Mac HDD. The professional Mac cloning utility clones your Mac hard drive and enables you to resize the destination drive, if it has some extra space. Moreover, it enables you to create the bootable DVD of your machine, which helps you to boot your Mac, if any instance of machine crash occurs.

With the availability of fast and large sized hard disks at affordable prices, you always have option to replace an old or damaged drive of your precious Mac with a new one, but you certainly cannot replace your hard earned data. Therefore, in such cases, if you have exact replica of your hard drive or hard drive contents then you can easily restore your entire data on this new hard drive and start working similarly as you were working with your old machine. This exact replica of your hard drive is known as its clone.

Like human clone, the clone of hard drive is also its mirror image, which you can use anytime for restoring your data including the boot drive. Some advantages of having clone of your Mac hard drive are:

• A Fully Operational Backup: The clone of your Mac hard drive is its exact replica or its complete backup that includes Operating System files, Partition Table structure, and home directories of all the Users. Therefore, it works as a miracle in various cases of machine failure or complete inaccessibility of your Mac. For this, you just have to plug your clone drive to your computer and then hold down the ‘Options’ key during machine startup.
• Portable Backup of Your Mac: Since it is advised to create clone of your hard drive on an external drive, thus most of the Mac users create clone on an external hard drive. Therefore, due to the small size of these external drives, they provide portability to carry your machine with you.
• Best Way to Handle Data Loss or Volume Corruption: The clone of your hard drive enables you to search some specific files by using the ‘Finder’ option and restore them. Moreover, you can restore a corrupt or lost volume from the clone as well.

Though, you can create hard drive clone by using Mac’s inbuilt utility ‘Disk Utility’, but many times it is seen that clone created through ‘Disk Utility’ is unsuccessful. Therefore, it is suggested to opt for a non-Apple Mac drive clone tool.

A professional Mac drive clone has easily understandable user interface and provides you some very useful features like cloning, imaging, and option to have bootable DVD. Moreover, a reliable Mac cloning tool facilitates you the option to resize the destination drive, so that you can easily utilize entire unused space.

The ‘Time Machine’ is an inbuilt backup utility introduced in Mac OS X 10.5 and later versions of OS X. This backup utility of Mac is designed in a way that it works easily with Time Capsule and any internal or external hard drive. To take the backup of your data with Time Machine, all you need to do is to connect the drive on which, you want to take the backup, and then ask the Time Machine to use this drive as destination drive for storing your data.

After this your Time Machine starts backing up your entire data automatically. In this way, with the help of Time Machine you can take your Mac’s hourly backup, daily backup, and weekly backup. With creating the backup of your entire data, the Time Machine allows you to go back in the recent past of your Mac, and see how your machine looked like at that time.

Disadvantages of Time Machine: Despite these features, your very own Time Machine has some flaws, which can be listed as:

• For any reason, if you want to change any previously set backup schedule with Time Machine, then you cannot do that. That means you cannot change any pre-set Time Machine backup schedule.
• Sometimes, you may encounter various errors or warning messages while creating backup with Time Machine, however these warning and errors are not clear. And thus it becomes difficult to resolve them.
• The first backup process that is being performed with your Time Machine can be very time taking.
• Larger the destination drive the more effective is your backup process. Therefore, the Time Machine backup needs big destination drives for efficient backups.

In this way, if you fall under any aforementioned flaws, then you may find it difficult to create backup with Time Machine. In such situations use of a non-Apple Mac cloning utility comes into existence. An efficient non-Apple utility for backing up your Mac data creates the exact replica or mirror image of your Mac hard drive and logical volumes. The clone created by any of the reliable Mac cloning tool is ready to use copy of your Mac and works as a boon in various cases of hard drive corruption or data loss. Most of the tools of this category have simple intuitive user interface and enable you to resize the volumes of the destination drive, if the destination drive contains extra space.

In this way reliable Mac cloning software overcomes almost all the flaws of Time Machine and comes across as the best method to backup your data.