Clone Mac hard drive or volume effectively using apps

Have you ever practised any strategy of backup in order to protect your precious data? How it sounds if you get assurity for the security of your entire Mac drive? 
Well, it is possible for home users and corporate via Drive cloning. We have seen or heard many cases of data loss causing a big harm to companies that effects their growth and reputation. Home users also face such situations of losing precious data in their day to day life. 

Because it is impossible to control or avoid situations like drive failure, so it is advisable to create clone of Mac drive. It is also important to understand that cloning prevents you to face the hardships of doing recovery of your lost data.

Fortunately, now a days people became aware of methods like drive cloning that keep them away from the losing precious data. As cloning ensures protection of your complete Mac drive.

There are many scenarios when cloning works as boom. One such scenario happened with me also that I am sharing with you.

One day I have experienced frequent lockups in many of my applications on iMac. I ran Disk Repair many times with Disk Utility and got the error, “The Volume Macintosh HD was found corrupt and needs to be repaired.” in every attempt.”

The above scenario shows the situation of your Mac suffering from application lockups. This problem demands to get repair immediately in order to maintain data security. Therefore, in order to repair Mac volume, you must try booting your Mac in Safe Mode using following easy and quick steps:

• Restart your Mac machine.
• Now, press and hold the Shift key immediately just after hearing the Mac startup tone.
  Please make sure you press the Shift key just after startup tone not before it only just at the right time.
   
• Release the Shift key as you see the gray colored apple icon and a spinning gear indicating progress.
• When it boots up to desktop, go for normal restart, and then check if the issue persists. 
   

Booting in safe mode tests your drive and shut down all unnecessary applications of your Mac OS X. It forces a directory check of startup volume. As it loads only required kernal extentions, but it lets you access Mac data in most situations (like crash,freeze) in order to find the cause of problem by troubleshooting. However, safe boot won't resolve your issue but help you to identify problems. So, in order to resolve problem first clone your drive and re-install Mac OS X.

The best way to protect your precious data and to avoid data loss situations is to clone entire Mac disk to an external drive. By getting a good Mac cloning application you can clone either the boot volume or the entire Mac drive including data. Cloning replicates the selected source drive by copying its internal sectors and structure. Moreover, clone Mac drive not only ensures the security of your OS X, but even of the data because clone drive can be used in the place of original drive. If your Mac machine encounters any issue in booting or volume inaccessibility , or any other data loss issue, you can handle it using your clone drive until you get back your original drive from repair.

So, it is important to create clone of your data in order to protect it from vulnerabilities(internal and external). Mac users ask why we need to back up data, as OS X is secure enough. While a few say yes fo backup, they use Time Machine for Mac data backup. Well, backing up data using Time Machine is great, as it facilitates taking incremental backup of every hour. Time machine also keeps a sharp eye on each alteration or modification you make in files or documents and update backup by itself. Time Machine works with Mac drive, external drive (USB hard drive). But, its disadvantage is it cannot gives bootable backups. Another disadvantage is you might not access you backup data if your drive has been crashed or failed. 

 

So, inversely drive cloning is better and allows you to face such situations of Mac drive failure easily with better results. Cloning process refers to replicating the contents and logical structure of Mac drive to another destination drive so that clone drive can be replaced by original drive when it fails. 

 

Now, you might be thinking what are the formal requirements for Mac cloning , and how it is done.

Formal Requirements you need to Clone your Mac Drive:

As it is understood from the name itself, that cloning requires another drive. This drive is called destination drive where you save clone copy of your Mac disk. But, make sure that the target drive(destination drive) is at least equal or greater in storage capacity as compared to the Mac drive(source drive).

To clone your Mac drive, you can opt for an efficient and reliable software to give results in desired manner. Here, we will discuss both Disk Utility and an reliable third party cloning tool.

Drive Cloning with Disk Utility

Mac OS X has Disk Utility as an inbuilt disk management application having capability of cloning drive. After attaching external drive to your Mac, launch Disk Utility and select the destination drive from the left hand pane. Now, make sure the drive is not partitioned and go to the Partition tab then specify it a name, select ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled)’ format in the drop-down list. Click 'option' button and choose GUID Partition or Apple Partition Map (on Intel-based Mac and on PowerPC-based Mac) to make this partition boot enabled. Click on Apply to save these modifications.

Now, click 'Restore tab' and drag source drive to Source filed and modified drive to Destination field of disk utility. Finally, click Restore button to start cloning.

Drive Cloning with Third party application:

You can find a lot Mac drive cloning software; however, it is important to select a good and authorized cloning application without causing any risk of harm. So, according to reviews I found Stellar Drive Clone as a reliable Mac cloning application. It is easy to use with an interactive interface. It creates bootable clone, and supports SSD. The most interesting thing is that software also has facility to create image of your Mac disk. It can clone your drive/volume including recovery HD.