How to Backup Mac Drive?

Maintaining data backup is always advised by experts to stay away from the worst situations like data loss or drive corrupt/failure. In case, if important file, photos or video gets lost then it can be recovered easily from the backup created earlier. Although, booting into safe mode, shutting down Mac machine properly, repairing file permissions and some other precautions keep a Mac machine in good condition. But few problems like file corruption or even complete volume corruption or volume inaccessibility force a user to make a successful offsite backup in advance. On the other hand, if you are a Mac user then surely you would be aware about ‘Time Machine’ and how to take and maintain data backup via Time Machine.  If you are not well versed with these concepts then please scroll down to learn about the steps of cloning Mac drive and how to take regular/incremental data backup.

What is Time Machine?

Time Machine is a built-in utility in Mac OS X for creating and maintaining data backup safely. It maintains a system to keep backup files in an organized order and remembers the Mac system-status for a particular time period in its memory in order to show, how the system looked on a particular day. This utility was introduced first time with the launching of Mac OS X Leopard version.

What is Time Machine Capsule?

Time Machine works with a storage device (any internal or external drive) called Time Capsule to store data backup files. Once this device is set up successfully then it works automatically with Time Machine for making a copy of everything existing on Mac. It can be of any size or capacity like 2TB or 3TB.

How to Clone Mac Drive?

The process of cloning Mac drive is not copying the files from boot drive to an external drive. Rather, it is a complete well organized way of copying each and every bit, hidden files, Symbolic links and System folder etc. Now the question arises, 

• How to take data backup with Time Machine?
• How to create a Mac drive clone with Disk Utility?
• How to create a bootable clone?

 

Data Backup with Time Machine

If Time Machine is set up successfully then taking backup is just one click work. One good thing about Time machine is that if storage drive gets filled then it overwrites the oldest data and store the new one on that storage place. For more details about setting up Time Machine, you can visit How to Use Time Machine for backup and restore data?

 

Cloning Mac HDD with Disk Utility

If you are running Mac OS X 10.3 or later, then you can clone your drive with the built-in Disk Utility feature. Follow the below mentioned steps for Mac drive cloning:

1. Select your new volume (indented) and click on the "Restore" tab.
2. Drag your old volume to the Source field.
3. Drag your new hard drive to the Destination field.
4. Click the check box for "Erasing Destination".
5. Click ‘Restore’ button at the bottom and it then will start copying over to your new hard drive.

Now the concept of Incremental Clone via Disk Utility comes, then Unfortunately, Disk Utility won't do an incremental clone and unable to create bootable clone rather disk image.

Instant way to create a Bootable Clone of Mac drive

If you are not able to clone Mac HDD with Disk Utility than try any Mac drive cloning software to get a bootable clone with in few clicks very easily without putting extra efforts and without wasting extra time.

If you are a newbie then Cloning Mac drive is not as easy as it seems, the main point lies in the success of cloned copy.