Overview of Cloning Hard Drive on Mac

Do you know what cloning means in Mac world? If not, then you should read this post in order to be acquainted with this concept. You might have been creating backup copies of all essential files of yours and saving them to some external storage media (such as a hard drive). However, you cannot even use this backup if your Mac is crashed. Can you restore your data from backup in such a situation? No, you cannot, until you reinstall the Mac. Well, cloning is the technology that can resolve this issue just like that.

What is Cloning

Cloning in Mac world is the best alternative to data backup techniques, which creates bootable backup of your Mac’s hard drive including data. In fact, cloning is the process of creating a replica of Mac’s hard drive, from which you can even boot.

Why to Clone

Since cloning process replicates the source drive on destination drive, following are the advantageous features of Mac drive clone:

• Cloning facilitates using both drives alternatively, as these drives are spitting images of each other.
• Clone drive is the bootable backup of the source drive.
• Data remains secure in case either of the hard drives is crashed.
• One can create more clones from the clone drive also.

Though both drives have similar properties and characteristics, they are completely independent of each other. Moreover, one can use clone drive as the portable hard drive.

Things to remember 

As discussed above that drive cloning process creates a bootable replica of the source drive, there are two prime necessities (i.e. a hard drive and the cloning tool) to create Mac drive clone, which must be fulfilled without failure.

1. The capacity of the destination drive (whether internal or external) must be equal to or higher than that of the source drive (i.e. drive to clone).
2. Destination drive should have equal number of volumes as on the source drive having similar file format (Mac OS Extended (Journaled)) and Partition Map Scheme (GUID Partition Table).

Case 1: Using an internal drive

If you are going to use an internal drive as the destination drive (i.e. to clone on), then you need to install it first. Make sure the cables you are going to connect to it are correct and check all screws properly.

Case 2: Using an external drive

In case of the external drive, you need the USB data cable to connect it to your Mac. Once you connect it to the Mac machine, please ensure that it is visible in the Disk Utility.

Cloning Process

When all requirements are fulfilled and you have gone through the key points, you can start cloning your Mac in easy steps. However, you need to format the destination hard drive using following steps:

(Boot your Mac OS X Lion or Mountain Lion in Recovery Mode, else use OS X install disc for earlier versions.)

1. Launch Disk Utility.
2. Select the destination hard drive shown on the left, and
3. Go to the Erase tab at the right.
4. In the Format dropdown list, select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and type a Name for this drive
5. Click Erase button, and again click Erase button in the pop-up warning
6. Wait until the drive is formatted

Once the drive is formatted, you can start cloning on it using following steps:

1. Select the source drive at the left and go to the Restore tab at the right.
2. If source drive is not listed in the Source field, then drag it here from the left pane.
3. Drag destination drive to the Destination field.

In some earlier versions of Mac, you need to click Erase Destination checkbox. In recent versions, destination drive is erased automatically.

4. Click Restore button to begin.

If cloning finishes successfully, then you can boot from the clone drive as well. For this, press ALT key when Mac is booting and choose clone drive.