Should I clone or Copy Mac before Mac OS X upgradation

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By the end of 2007, on 26^th October, when Mac OS X leopard was released by Apple Inc., it was really a big day for Mac users. I was also in a hurry and excited to experience its 300 enhancements and new features over its predecessor Tiger.

But, before upgrading it to leopard I have made a copy of all my documents, files, applications etc. to the external drive and then erased the current Mac drive. After that I was ready for upgrading my Mac to OS X leopard and that I have done successfully. I enjoyed lots of new features of leopard like new improved automator, boot camp, iChat, iCal, Photo Booth,Quicklook, TimeMachine, Spotlight,user interface etc.

Everything was right except that,my copied applications are not running. Although my files, video,songs all are easily accessible but not apps.

Its really terrible for me because I had approx 30 apps out of which I purchased twelve and downloaded ohers. And this was really painful to loose all my apps. Then I realized that just copying is not enough as it is, so in order to make it executable we need to create clone of our Mac drive.

When I shared this with my friends I came to know some more worst that my friends suffered. And that is there drive got crashed during upgradation and they loose all of their data and OS all of sudden. Then we all get back to search for finding ways from internet inorder to protect our Mac from the same.

After working for hours we get to know that cloning is the optimal solution for the problem we have faced. So, in future before doing activities like upgradation, partitioning, swithching machine its essential to clone Mac drive.

Data is never safe on your machine, so we must take regular backups. But, is it sufficient to take backup of your Mac using Time Machine? Although, Mac backup utility 'Time machine' is great but can't give you bootable clone. So, you have to depend on some third party utility for creating bootable clone of your drive.

And that is the most compelling reason of using cloning method not copying or backup.

Now, I have Mountain lion and I cloned my drive regularly (twice in a month) using Stellar Drive Clone software that I found really awesome. It supports my new SSD also and can clone ExFat formatted files, MBR and Fat32 also. This utility creates bootable clone of your Mac drive and Recovery HD. It is easy, fast, reliable and can create image of my Mac drive in few clicks only.