How to Backup and Clone Your Hard Drive in Mac OS X.

23 April 2009 by Vinay 3 Comments

Data backup or Hard – Drive Cloning is very important because your computer has many important personal files. Imagine if they all disappeared one day, you would probably be devastated. Hard drives don’t live forever, as some people seem to think, therefore it’s important to back up your hard drive regularly.There are many free and paid backup and image software available which allow you to take a snapshot of your hard disk so that you can restore it at a later time to a new hard You may refer to some paid applications for cloning or make a backup of your entire or partial data. A perfect computer backup and disk recovery program that allows you to create hard disk drive images and file backups. Mac OS X has a simple built in utility that can do the same task at no cost. We’re talking about Disk Utility ( User > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.app ) It’s free, easy-to-use, and it does the job right.

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Here’s how to use Disk Utility to clone and backup your hard drive:

Fire the Mac OS X disk that came along with your Mac. To do this, insert the CD or DVD into your Mac, and hold down the C key while your Mac restarts.

Go ahead select your language. Don’t worry: You’re not installing Mac OS X again – this is just what you have to do to get to Disk Utility. When the menu bar appears, select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.

When Disk Utility opens, you’ll want to select your source. This is the hard drive you want to clone and/or backup. After you have a source, select the Destination. This is the hard drive you want to save the backup image to.

Click Restore and you’ll end up with a perfect copy of your hard drive. Restart your computer and you’re good to go!

That’s it……

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3 Comments »

Shrwin said:

Thanks for that! Will this mean that my cloned drive is bootable as well?

# 25 April 2009 at 4:42 am

Vinay Prashar said:

@ Shrwin,

No but you can check here or download free copy of carbon cloner here.

# 25 April 2009 at 12:50 pm

David said:

@Vinay
when you say it is not bootable, do you mean while it is still an external drive, or do you mean period? Meaning if I create a clone using disk utility following the instructions in the article, then replace my original drive with the clone i just made, are you saying that it won’t boot?

Thanks in advance…

- David

# 24 March 2010 at 3:17 am