How to Backup your Mac drive: Cloning and imaging

A few years ago, data disaster news used to be very common causing huge loss for organisations. But, if you are still facing the same problem inspite of having advanced backup technology available for your vital data, then you must hurry to have this thing which I am going to explain. 

 

But, before I discuss the advanced areas of the technology, its necessary to introduce Cloning . It refers to making a bootable copy of entire drive or volume. Wheareas Image of a Hard drive consists of copying the contents but not creating the bootable backup. Sometimes it leaves certain files, like some supportive files and temp files etc.
 

When I compared options to backup in Mac and Windows. I realized that Mac users have more options of cloning than Windows users. As far as need of Cloning software is concerned, Time machine is available as inbuilt application in Mac OS X. But, users don't find it much friendly to use and search for some third party tools for backup.

The third party Cloning applications offer options to save clone to another volume, folder, or a network drive.

Limitations of Time Machine:

It only makes you to restore your system after reinstalling OS X in your machine.
So, what happen if disaster hits, imagine..!! when you don't have this kind of facility?

Difference between cloning and Imaging along with benefits:
As we discussed above that Clone is making exact replica of your drive while in imaging sometimes certain files are left to clone. So, question arises why it is so? Actually imaging of drive/folder/volume is done in compressed form(some supported files,temp files left).

Even then Imaging is very beneficial and often users and professionals prefer to image to save time. Other than this, Imaging leaves bad sectors in our drive/volume on which we applied it as it make image of only OK things present in our volume. 
 
Apart from this, Imaging takes less memory compared to cloning and about half of time require by clone for the same volume.

Clone is bootable backup of your Mac’s drive that provides facility to boot a machine. It means you can boot our system by making clone of our operating system. But you can't boot our system with an image.

Ability to get up and start working just in minutes after a crash,data disaster or system update is really appreciateble and useful thing.

Clone provide a way to rollback installation of your Mac OS X. If need arise you can use your clone to boot another Mac also and can keep updated your clone using synchronization software which perform incremental updates.

Types of Cloning :

1.Block level

2.File level

Requirements for cloning:
The volume being cloned, generally needs either the same size or larger at destination drive. The disk should be large enough to hold all cloned data on destination with some free space available.

Third party cloning tool:
Now a days many advanced and user friendly cloning software are available to backup your drive. The softweare I have tried is Stellar Clone. Its a convenient,efficient and pocket frendly as compared to others.
This software have advanced option to resize volumes on the destination drive while cloning. A complete support for cloning OS X Lion boot volume including Recovery HD.
This utility ensures you that your data has been protected and secured as it offers safest means to clone your Mac drive.