Clone your Mac OS X 10.8 Drive with Stellar Drive Clone

As per my experience of working in the IT industry, I have learned that we must have a reliable backup strategy in order to protect our precious data. Imagine a situation, when you are trying to restore something from your single backup copy having all of your files and applications and suddenly it got corrupt.

Actually such situation has already happened with me. When I tried to restore my files from my time machine backup, it failed. I was not able to restore because there was a problem with one backup file.

Today, with time machine and many third party software availability, backup methods are easier to understand and process so we should develop and implement these backup methods in our daily routine. No matter, whether you are in business, working in an IT industry, or a home user, everyone should follow the habit of backing up his data in order to keep data on safe side.

As in the title of this post I have mentioned software Stellar Drive Clone – it is the recommended Mac cloning and backup application I have tried in my Mac mini. 

 

The purpose of this blog post is to give details of cloning Mac drive using Mac Time machine and Stellar Drive Clone application.

In the past, I have gone through other Mac cloning software also so, as per my experience I will recommend Stellar Drive Clone as your secondary backup solution. 

 

Steps to clone your Mac OS X10.8 drive using Stellar Drive Clone

Requirements: An external hard drive of equal or greater size to the drive you wish to clone.

Processor:Intel, PowerPC (G3 or later)

• Operating System: Mac OS X 10.3 or later.
• Memory: 256 MB RAM
• Hard Disk: 25 MB of free space

Steps:-

1. Download Stellar Drive Clone (Found here: http://www.stellarclonedrive.com/download-free-mac-drive-clone.php
2. Open the “stellardriveclone.dmg” file and drag the file to “Applications” folder.
3. Connect an external drive to your Mac.
4. Open “Disk Utility” Application. (located in /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility app).
5. Format your external hard drive.NOTE: Use the “Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted)” format to encrypt your drive in order to give it password you provide. If you do not need encrypted backup then you can go for “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” format.

Features provided by Stellar Drive Clone in demo version:

1. Restore volume image from folder

2. Restore volume from volume image file

3. Clone your Mac to network

Clone to folder

For taking advantage of all features you should purchase its full version.

Features provide in Full Version

1. Create Bootable DVD

2. Minimal System (quick bootable clone including only default Mac files)

3. Imaging Mac drive,volume

4. Disk Clone and Clone to volume

5. Support windows file formats in Mac

Stellar drive clone starts with two options 'Cloning' and 'imaging' with three buttons at the top: Clone and Imaging, restore and tools.

One can click as per the requirement whether wants to create clone or image of Mac drive/volume.

Select the drive you want to clone as source drive and destination drive and then click continue.

How to take backup of your OS X 10.8 Drive with Time Machine

Requirements: An external drive larger than the size of the drive you wish to backup.

1. Connect your external hard drive to your Mac.
2. Open the “Disk Utility” Application. (located in Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility).
3. Format/Erase your external drive.

Now, Open the “Time Machine” Application. (located in /Applications/System Preferences).

1.Specify your desired backup location by clicking the “Select Backup Disk” button on ots interface.

2.Select the external disk to be used as destination backup drive by Time Machine.

3.You can schedule your backups like hourly,daily, weekly routines as per your requirement.

4. If you want to keep secure backups, then you can use file vault further for encrypting your backups.