There are a couple of downsides including that you need software, and that any viruses you have on the current computer will come across with the bootable clone. A bootable clone is quite simply a disc copy of your hard drive that you can launch onto another computer in order to install your old one. Whether you want a backup of your drive, or you want to migrate your hard drive to a new computer without the hassle of using a transfer cable, creating an exact bootable clone of your hard drive might be the answer. Consider this another tool in your toolbox.How to Make an Exact Bootable Clone of Your Hard Drive? There’s no running catalog of your files, like Time Machine offers, meaning you can’t dig up old versions of things you’ve overwritten.Ī system image isn’t a great primary backup, but it is great to have around when things go wrong. RELATED: What You Need to Know About Creating System Image BackupsĪgain, these full system backups probably shouldn’t be your primary backup. It may be possible to run it on a different Mac of the same model, or even some other Macs, but we haven’t tested this and your mileage may vary. You’ll have the best results running this on the same Mac it was cloned from (like if that Mac’s hard drive dies, but all its other hardware is okay). Your Mac will start up as normal, but everything will be loaded from you external drive instead of your internal one.
To boot from your external drive, simply click on it and click the arrow below it. You’ll eventually see a few booting options.
To boot from your cloned backup, simply plug your drive into your Mac, press the Power button, and hold the Option key right when the system turns on. When you’re ready, we can test the drive out. Start up Super Duper and you’ll see an extremely simple window.įeel free to eject the drive when the process is complete. We’ll be using Super Duper for this tutorial, but the steps won’t differ much for Carbon Copy Cloner. Both free versions are fine for occasionally creating a bootable backup. The full versions allow you to schedule updates on a regular basis and update backups with new changes only. Both offer free limited versions, and full versions for $30 and $40, respectively.
There are two main Mac options for creating bootable backups: Super Duper and Carbon Copy Cloner. You can technically use Disk Utility to copy your entire hard drive, but the result will not be bootable on an external drive.
0 kommentar(er)
