Drive Cloning to replace Data Backup on Mac

You might be backing up every essential Mac file of yours on daily basis. However, taking backup does not really guarantee for the security of your essential data. You may not be able to restore your data, if your backup drive is no longer accessible after a disaster strikes. 

On the other hand, hard drive cloning keeps your Mac alive and data accessible even after your Mac is crashed. In reality, hard drive cloning refers to the process of creating a bootable copy of your Mac drive to another drive based on certain criterion, which is that the secondary drive (i.e. clone drive) you are going to use as the clone drive should be larger or at least equal in size as compared to the source drive.

Apart from this, you need to make sure that the following requirements are satisfied before you proceed to clone Mac drive:

Format secondary drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled)

• When you attach the secondary hard drive to your Mac, a Disk Insertion message box pops up
• Click initialize button on this message box to launch Disk Utility.
• Highlight this drive at the left and go to the Erase tab at the right.
• In the Format menu, choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
• Type a Name for the disk and click Erase button.

Use GUID Partition Table as the Partition Map Scheme for secondary drive

• With secondary hard drive selected at the left, go to the Partition tab at the right.
• Click Options button and choose GUID Partition table in the opening window, and
• Click OK button.

Partition secondary drive into the number of volumes equal to that on the primary drive

• With secondary drive selected at the left, click Volume Scheme menu to choose the number of partitions you want to create (e.g. if you choose 4 Partitions, this disk will be partitioned into four partitions of equal sizes).
• Now, select a partition in the partitioned structure of the hard drive, and type a Name, choose Format, and specify a Size for it (i.e. Format should be Mac OS Extended (Journaled)).
• Repeat this step for other volumes as well.
• Finally, click Apply button to save the changes.
• In the pop up message, click Partition button to allow partitioning.

The time taken by this process is based on the size of the hard drive and the number of partitions you create on it. Once this process is finished, track the following steps to clone Mac drive:

Important: If you are running Mac OS X Lion or Mountain Lion, then boot it in Recovery Mode (hold down Command + R keys or Option key when Mac is booting). Once you see grey screen, choose Disk Utility in the Mac OS X Utilities window. However, the users running Mac OS X versions earlier than Mac Lion boot their Macs with Mac boot disc. Select a preferred Mac OS X language, click Next button, and then click Disk Utility in the Mac OS X Utilities window.

• Select Primary hard drive (i.e. your Mac drive) in the left pane of Disk Utility, and
• Go to the Restore tab at the right.
• Now, drag primary drive to the right pane and drop it to the Source field (if it is not already shown therein).
• Likewise, drag secondary hard drive to the right pane and drop it to the Destination field.

(If you have multiple hard drives installed on your Mac, then please ensure that the chosen drives are correct)

• Finally, click Restore button to start cloning your Mac drive.

Now, since the process involves replicating the entire hard drive including all data, the process may take long time to complete. Once Mac cloning is finished successfully, you can boot from it as well. Some users find cloning using disk utility a little bit complicated so, usually they prefer to perform this using some third party application.

Currently, I am using Stellar Drive Clone application for creating bootable clone of Mac disk and clone of my recovery HD. One can create image, backup of their Mac drive,volumes, folders in any external drive and network drive etc. This application is capable to take clone or backup of window partition in your Mac disk.

Steps to protect Mac drive from failure by scaning its bad sectors?

Have you ever faced the problem of bad sectors in Mac drive? It just takes five minutes for some tricks to analyze and maintain your Mac drive health?

Today, in this advanced digital world, devices like computers, mobiles etc. are becoming important part of our life as we keep all our confidential, official and personal data(photos, songs, video etc) in them. So, it is necessary to take care of our drive's health and protect it from failure and hence for preventing against data loss.

Here, we will discuss about assessing health status of your Mac drives to prevent from crashes and failure incidents. We know that the hard drives are prone to crash and no one can predict the life of a drive. But, today we have enough techniques to work upon it for making it less vulnerable to failure.

A drive has various sectors that store data packets in it. Basically a 'sector' is a unit of information stored on your hard disk. The data stored in sectors (standard size of 512 bytes) in sequential fashion, that helps in accessing data easily and fastly.

We all know the affects of hard drive failure could be very devastating, particularly if it had been a long time since you backed up your important Mac data. I want to add here one more important technology of creating clone or backup of your Mac drive or data regularly. By using cloning method regularly one would feel free from such bad surprises of drive crash or corruption that cause your data loss and sometimes beyond recovery level.

   

However it is also equally important to regularly check your Mac drive status using some relaible smart tools that helps you to maintain your drive health and can scan for bad sectors. These tools let you know the problems and areas that required fixing before it start generating troubles.Such a diagnostic tool is capable in scanning your Mac drive for bad sectors and check your internal drive S.M.A.R.T status.

A very well known application for analyzing your Mac drive is Stellar Drive toolbox. Specifically, the module “Drive Monitor”, assesses the drive performance, scans for bad sectors. It allows you to set preferences for the monitoring tasks. It provide you the capability to perform all above mentioned process and create performance report of your Mac drive and hence shows health of drive.

There are many types of hard drives available in market but all are vulnerable to crash after a while. Some common signs of drive failure are:-

• Sometimes one can predict it if an audible clicking sound comes that signify the problem in movement of spindle over the disk or spinning is not smooth.

• While in other cases, a drive that can be fail will reported errors during boot up or unexplained glitches.

You should follow the preventive measures even if your Mac drive isn’t showing the signs of crash or failure. I mean it is always good to take preventive steps towards your drive and data before it gets late and results affect your productivity. One must scan his Mac disk at least a couple of times in a year.

Note: However, if you suspect that your Mac drive can fail then your first step must be to create clone of your Mac drive, as soon as possible. Because in such a drive, risk of losing data, grows with time.

The above mentioned software i.e Drive Monitor tool for maintaining your Mac drive health performs three major tasks as follows:

• It give details of your internal drive SMART attributes.
• It scans your Mac drive for bad sectors.
• One can view the performance status of Mac drive with the help of graphical representation.

This utility comes in a package alongwith 13 other Mac optimization utilities, integrated as a whole called Drivetool box. It consists all required Mac maintenance utilities with some great applications like Mac partition manager, drive clone, speedup Mac, defragmentation tool etc. This whole package comes in $99 which is a complete optimization package for your Mac OS X.

For more details one can visit: http://www.drivetoolbox.com/

How to build best cloning or backup solution for your Mac

We all have some to-do list according to our priorities. Most of us keep 'cloning and backup' at number one in our list whether its a matter of professional data or a personal one. Everyone wants to know how to create or build the best backup or cloning solution for their Mac or PC.

As we know that it is essential to create clone of our data before it gets too late. But, still we neglect or ignore it? Probably, it’s because we don’t accept its importance. While some of you having a false perception that cloning is a boring and difficult task. So, avoidance comes naturally at the instant this thought comes in your mind.

However, it is better to pay attention towards it as soon as you know that it is strongly recommendation by experts and things go worse because not even the manufacturer can guarantee the life of a hard drive.

There are a lot of situations that make you think over creation of clone drive as a backup in some external drive. Suppose, your laptop get stolen and you have to deliver presentation on the very next day or need to show your project or semester assignment. You won’t be worry if are with a proper backup copy of your stolen drive. 
 

Secondly, your machine is always prone to data loss disaster — it’s only a matter of time. Is it good to live in a fear of digital catastrophe, instead, take a step to create the clone of your Mac drive or PC whatever you have in some storage device. Believe me it is easier than you might think.

Actually when my Mac is running fine, it’s hard to remember to do the routine maintenance(include clean up junk files, duplicate,cache,log files etc.) that, deep down, I know I should. It doesn't mean that Mac maintenance isn’t on my to-do list, it’s just like we didn't realize until something bad happened that pressing us to give attention. 

I used to maintain my Mac in order to maintain its performance like day one. Similarly you need to backup files and clone your entire Mac drive in order to prevent a data loss situation. Because an emergency drive is required in many data disaster situations. It is a bad habit to say “I will clone my drive tomorrow”.

Now, where to begin?

Basically we talk about best cloning approach for Mac OS X. The first basic thing you need is some kind of storage device to keep your backups or clone of your drive. 
 

There are many digital belongings from USB hard drives(SSD) to the out fashioned DVD. These drives are an excellent choice but one can include more advanced systems like RAID enclosures and NAS drives to add more storage and better reliability.

If you had never experienced a catastrophic data loss or you are the person who might not be so concern or worried about it. Then you should ask to the users who paid high for expensive data recovery software. Here is not the money issue but the 'time' you spend which is unrecoverable. So, from this what you got is -­-­-­ creating clone is well worth the time. One thing that I not mentioned is the case of people who never got their data back because it is beyond recovery.

Hence, creating clone and backup important files in my Mac is at the top of my to-do list of my weekend activities. 
 

Now come to the point, I knew that to build a best reliable backup or cloning plan, we needed to set up some standard qualities:

• Quick performance
• Create clone, image and restore backups
• Create clone of individual volumes,folder and entire drive including Recovery HD
• Interactive interface
• Support many file formats

There are a various cloning options for Mac users. Some are complex than others, but each addresses a slightly different type of users. Some cloning software are customizable with advanced features, while others focus are on ease-of-use. 
 

So, we opt best cloning software solely based on the above mentioned standards. 
 

The Stellar Drive Clone application which we find in many authorized reviews site. It supports both file level and block level cloning, alike CCC (carbon copy cloner). It creates clone of your drive, volume on any drive or network drive also. It can create clone of your recovery HD, alike superduper. Support to Windows file formats on Mac, is a unique feature in this easy to use cloning application..