Simple Steps to Clone Mac Hard Drive for Preventing Data Loss

Usually, all of you maintain the backup of your precious files and folders, but you may

sometimes need a bootable backup or (more precisely) clone of your hard drive. Mac

users need not worry in all such cases, as Mac OS X provides the feature to back up

almost everything on it, including the Operating System (OS), files, software. This

backup is known as clone of your hard drive.

The hard drive clone enables you to have your complete system on an external hard drive

or other external data storage media, which you can boot anytime without needing to

install the OS again. Additionally, the clone is the best source of data backup that helps

Mac users for easily overcoming disastrous situations of data loss. Apart from this, some

people want to have a spare system wherein they can test all the new software and

applications before installing them to their system. For them, clone of their hard drive

works as a boon.

The ‘Disk Utility’ of your Mac is the tool to perform the cloning of your hard drive.

However, you need to have a destination drive (an external hard drive or other external

data storage media) for cloning your complete hard drive to it. Before starting the cloning process,

make sure that your target or destination drive is not having any data. Since the

cloning process writes everything from the source drive to the destination drive, the

chances of overwriting of data on destination drive are high. Thus, it is said to observe

this precaution.

Follow the below mentioned steps to perform the cloning of your hard 

drive with ‘Disk

Utility’ of your Mac OS X:

• Step 1: Attach the external hard drive to your system.
• Step 2: Open ‘Disk Utility’ by going to the path ‘User >>Applications >> Utilities >
  > Disk Utility’.
• Step 3: From the left pane of the ‘Disk Utility’, select the hard drive 
  of which you want to create the clone, and then click the ‘Restore’ tab
  provided at the top of the right pane.
• Step 4: The drive that you want to clone is listed under ‘Source’ field. Select the drive on which you want to copy everything and drag it to 
  the ‘Destination’ field.
• Step 5: Click ‘Restore’ button provided at the bottom of this interface. Note: Ensure that there is nothing important on the destination drive because it will be erased after the cloning.

If everything works fine, you will be able to have a complete clone of your

hard drive on the destination drive easily. However, this cloning process 

may take a large amount of time, which entirely depends upon the size of 

your source drive. Moreover, it is assumed that your source drive has only 

one partition or volume.

In case your source drive is having multiple partitions and you want all the

partitions to be cloned,then make sure your destination drive or target hard

drive has the same number and size of partitions. That means the partition structure of both the drives source and destination must match.

Once identical partitions are created on your target hard drive, you can 

easily clone each partition or volume using the above method, except the

OS partition. This clearly indicates that the bootable clone of a hard drive

cannot be created with ‘Disk Utility’, if it has multiple partitions or 

volumes on your source hard drive.

Therefore, in situations wherein you want to create the bootable backup of your Mac hard drive that is having multiple partitions and that too without taking much time, using professional utility to clone Mac drive is recommended. A professional software like Stellar Drive Clone creates 

the exact replica of your Mac hard drives and logical volumes. 

Apart from cloning, the software also provides some other efficient features

like imaging with which you can create the image of one hard drive volume

or the complete volume. 

The availability of the software to create bootable volume or minimal

system keeps you away from the grief of Disk Utility’s inability to create

the bootable clone of Mac that has partitions.

Moreover, this efficient utility enables you to make full use of the storage space on your destination

drive by allowing you to resize volumes during the process of cloning. The option ‘Clone with resizing’ enables you to resize volumes on your 

destination drive and utilize all of its storage space.However, if you wish,

you can also select the option to clone the hard drive without resizing the destination drive. The software provides you both the options. The simple steps of this software for creating the clone of hard drive without resizing

the destination drive are:

• Step 1: Run ‘Stellar Drive Clone’ software.
• Step 2: Go to ‘Clone & Imaging’ tab and click the ‘Clone’ button. 
  This displays the cloning screen.
• Step 3: Select ‘Disk Clone’ option, and then opt for the option that says ‘Clone without resizing’
• Step 4: Select your ‘Source’ drive and the ‘Destination’ drive from 
  ‘Select Source’ list and 'Select Destination’ list respectively.
• Step 5: Click ‘Continue’ for starting the cloning process.

With these simple steps, the software will clone the entire source drive to 

the destination

drive without making any changes to it. However, before selecting any storage drive as destination or target drive, make sure that it is larger than or equal

to in size than the source drive. If you want to create the clone of your hard 

drive by resizing your destination drive, follow the below mentioned steps:

• Step 1: Run ‘Stellar Drive Clone’ application.
• Step 2: Go to ‘Clone & Imaging’ tab and click the ‘Clone’ button. You 
  will get a‘Cloning’ screen.
• Step 3: Select ‘Disk Clone’ option, and then select ‘Clone with resizing’ option.
• Select the source and destination drive from ‘Select Source’ list and ‘Select Destination’ list.
• Step 4: Click ‘Continue’ and you will see the resizing window.
• Step 5: Now select the volume that you want to resize. Enter new size 
  or drag the
  slider to mention the new size of the Volume(s) in your destination drive. Click ‘Accept Size’ every time you make changes in the size of the volume(s).
• Step 6: Click ‘Continue’ for starting the cloning process.

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So far, you have seen that commercial software are certainly better than

‘Disk Utility’,as

they not only enable you to create the bootable clone of a hard drive 

having partitions, but

also lets you resize volumes on the destination drive.The easily 

understandable steps of Stellar Drive Clone tool let you perform the cloning of your hard drive by your own without needing any help of a professionalor technical user.

To analyze this tool, you can initially download its free demo version.

The demo lets you perform various cloning options very exhaustively; 

however, to create the final image of your hard drive,you need to purchase

the license of the software, which bears a reasonable cost.

Why to Clone Mac OS X 10.8.3 Drive

Recently, Apple Inc. released the latest Mac OS X Mountain Lion version (i.e. Mac OS X 10.8.3), thereby fixing the bugs in Safari, Security Update 2013-001, and many other apps. Many of you might have upgraded to OS X 10.8.3 as suggested by Apple. Mac OS X 10.8.3 integrates security, stability, and compatibility.

Latest Mac OS X version is likely to fix many of the bugs encountered in earlier and a few current versions. However, many users are complaining that their Mac machine is freezing, crashing, and a few are getting gray screen on startup after upgrading to the latest OS X 10.8.3.

Apple must be aware of the tribulations users are facing after upgrading to OS X 10.8.3. Therefore, the developers must make sure to fix the issues soon..

However, users are recommended to stick to their current data security strategies (such as Mac drive cloning and imaging) to protect their valuable data. As cloning a Mac drive involves formal process of duplication, the resulted drive is an exact copy of the source drive, which is used in place of the original drive.

After a formal upgrade to the latest Mac OS X 10.8.3, you certainly do not want anything happening adversely. Therefore, Mac drive cloning not only ensures the data is protected, but even ensures for robustness of the Mac machine. Disk Utility troubleshoots the issues (such as disk permissions error, data read/write problem, volume header corruption, etc.) encountered while accessing Mac volumes, including boot volume. Moreover, it facilitates cloning the complete Mac 10.8.3 drive at once or individual volumes.

Follow the straightforward process discussed below to clone a Mac volume using Disk Utility:

Open disk utility from Applications-> Utilities folder. Click the Restore tab in the right pane of the disk utility window. Now drag and drop the target volume from the left pane of the Disk Utility window to the source field in the right pane.

Similarly, drag and drop the destination volume from the left pane to the destination field. Now, make sure that the selected volumes are correct.

In addition, make sure the destination volume does not contain any data. If it does, move everything to any other location, as cloning is going to format the destination drive first. At last, click Restore button to initiate the cloning process.

However, if you are cloning the boot volume of the Mac OS X 10.8.3, it is recommended to go to Recovery mode, and then start cloning.