How To Clone Your Primary/Boot Drive

Article ID = 41
Article Title = How To Clone Your Primary/Boot Drive
Article Author(s) = Graham Needham (BH)
Article Created On = 18th July 2011
Article Last Updated = 8th July 2019
Article URL = https://www.macstrategy.com/article.php?41

Article Brief Description:
Instructions for "cloning" your primary/boot disk

How To Clone Your Primary/Boot Drive

macOS 10.13 or later may convert your startup/boot disk to APFS format - backup/cloning/disk repair software will need to be updated/upgraded to work with APFS
macOS 10.15 Catalina has a dedicated system volume - backup/cloning/disk repair software will almost definitely need to be updated/upgraded to work with this version of macOS or later

This article is about "cloning" your primary/boot drive. We also have an article about backing up your Mac computer. Cloning is the facility to make an exact duplicate of your current setup including the operating system, all applications and all your user(s) data. It is an easy way to make a backup of your system and data that you can relatively quickly restore. You can "clone" your hard disk using software applications:

Bombich Software Carbon Copy Cloner
Shirt Pocket SuperDuper!
Propaganda Productions Déjà Vu (Deja Vu)
Clone X
MacDaddy Mac Backup Guru
Micromat Techtool Pro

NOTE: You can also clone drives while booted from an Emergency Boot Drive.

Basic Clone Procedure Using Carbon Copy Cloner

NOTE: Bombich Software have a full help section on their web site.

To be safe:

Restart your computer.
Quit all running applications.
Disconnect all external devices except for monitor, keyboard, mouse and required storage volumes.
Eject all optical discs.
Unmount all servers.

Connect your backup storage device.
If you need to erase the data on the disk/volume/partition you are going to clone to use Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility to format it first.
Launch Carbon Copy Cloner.
Choose the volume that you want to clone from the Source menu.
Choose a properly-formatted volume from the Destination menu.
Select "Maintain a back (Archive modified and deleted items)" from the preconfigured settings menu.
Click the Clone button.

Basic Clone Procedure Using SuperDuper!

NOTE: Shirt Pocket have a full, downloadable PDF User Guide on their web site.

To be safe:

Restart your computer.
Quit all running applications.
Disconnect all external devices except for monitor, keyboard, mouse and required storage volumes.
Eject all optical discs.
Unmount all servers.

Connect your backup storage device.
Launch SuperDuper!
Choose the volume that you want to backup (clone) from the 'Copy' pop-up menu.
Choose the volume that you want to clone to from the 'to' pop-up menu.
Select "Backup - all files" from the 'using' pop-up menu.
If you need to erase the data on the disk/volume/partition you are going to clone click the "Options" button then go to the "General" tab and select "Erase Backup, then copy files from xxx" from the 'During copy' pop-up menu. Click OK.
Check the "What's going to happen" section is what you actually want to happen.
Click the Copy Now button

Basic Clone Procedure Using Déjà Vu

NOTE: Propaganda Productions have a help page on their web site.

To be safe:

Restart your computer.
Quit all running applications.
Disconnect all external devices except for monitor, keyboard, mouse and required storage volumes.
Eject all optical discs.
Unmount all servers.

Connect your backup storage device.
Launch Déjà Vu
Choose the volume that you want to backup (clone) in the 'What' column.
Choose the volume that you want to clone to from the 'Where' column.
Click the 'Back Up' button to begin

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