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.