Clone Vs Backup of Important data in Mac

Cloning and backup both are different concepts. Clone is a bootable backup of your Mac drive that provides stand up for both your vital data and Mac OS in any volume corruption or loss. Cloning is easy process and it is complementary to backup methods like Time Machine backup. By cloning or backup one can get back to his/her work even after a crash or failure.

Requirements for making clone:

You need a to store the clone at external disk or partition. Whatever you have either disk or partition, it should be large enough (more than the source drive) in size to hold all the data of source drive by leaving at least 10GB of free space. The cloning process creates exact replica of selected drive or volume to be cloned to your designated destination drive.

Clone Bootable disk

You can make bootable clone of your drive,recovery HD and boot camp partition by using some third party tool because time machine of Mac doesn't provide this facility. Stellar Drive Clone is one such popular utility that is able to make bootable copy of your Mac drive.

Below I have described the process to create bootable clone of your drive using Mac disk utility.

Mac’s Disk Utility can create clone of Mac Drive using its restore tab. In my upcoming blog, I will describe how to create bootable clone of Mac drive using Disk Utility that should be fairly simple to you.

Advantages of making bootable clone

Create functional Backup of Entire Mac data:

By cloning your Mac Drive, you are actually creating an exact copy of your entire Mac machine, this includes Partition structure, OS files and the directories. You can boot your Mac machine with clone of your drive in situations when your Mac rejects booting.

Platform for testing applications and troubleshooting Issues:

The Clone Drive can be used to test new applications updates before installing them onto the primary drive. Also,it can be used to troubleshoot errors of your Mac drive.

Replacement of Primary Hard Drive:

In case of a Hard Drive failure or crash, one could be crippled for weeks before the primary Drive could be repaired and data restoration process. Instead, you could be immediately back to form by booting up your Mac using your bootable Clone.