Drive Clone - How To Clone a Mac OS X Drive To External Hard Drive

Have you ever gave it a thought what will you do if your system goes corrupt, all the data in the system will be lost. You will then have to look out for some mac data recovery software to get the data back from the system. An extra cost as most of the time what we do is take the back up of one drive and keep it in to the other drive thinking that if one drive goes corrupt the data can be recovered.


Few of us keep the back up of the crucial data in to external hard drives too. But we don't really bother about rest of the data or the applications. I think that why not we create a clone of the hard drive so that even if the system crashes all the data as well as the applications are there kept safe on another drive if we don't have the time for the recover process or we don't want to get the extra cost to get in we can clone the drive.

Not most of the Mac users have the time machine to help them in the situation like this. Drive clone process will not only help you recover the data it will also create a bootable back-up copy of your hard drive. This will make you recover each and every data on the drive. Drive cloning is really a simple process. Intel Macs running on Panther or later have the Disk Utility which allows you to create the drive clone to an external hard drive and that too very easily.

Steps To Create a Drive Clone:

• Plug in the external hard drive to the Mac system and there after turn on the external hard drive too.
• Move to the Applications/Utilities Folder in the Disk utility.
• Now need to select the drive from the list that appears in front of you in the left-side of the window.
• You will find restore tab then click on it.
• Now drag you drive to the "Source" field.
• The external hard drive needs to be dragged to the "Destination" field.
• Now look out for "Restore".

Once you click restore a clone of your hard drive will be created on your external hard drive.

Is it possible to Clone a Bootcamp Partition? How to do it ?

If you want to use a Apple Bootcamp program so that a Windows run on your Mac system, a dedicated partition on the Mac hard drive for Windows Operating System and for all the windows file has to be there. If in-case you want to backup the entire Partition or transfer data to another computer to set up a bootcamp, then you will have to create a clone of the hard drive. This can be easily dome by using the Disk Utility there in your Mac system.

Steps to be followed:

• Boot your Mac system to the Mac OS X side then log into the a user account.
• Now open the New finder window, you can do that by clicking on to the icon on the Dock
• Now go to the applications section on your Mac drive
• Now open the Utilities folder and open the Disk Utility by double clicking on to it's icon
• Now select the Bootcamp partition from the list of the drives you see on the left side of the window
• You need to be sure of that the actual partition is highlighted there,not the main hard drive where the actual partition exists.
• Now click the New Image button that will be there at the top f the Disk Utility Window.
• Next step will be to enter the name of the clone image, then choose the location where to save the file.
• It may be possible that the clone would be of large size so save it on a external hard drive
• Now choose the Compressed from the Image format it will be there in the drop-down menu.
• Now click on the save button, the cloning of the partition will now start.
• The cloning may take time depending upon the data you have on the drive.

Choose "Compressed" from the "Image Format" drop-down menu and hit the "Save" button to begin cloning the partition. Depending on how much data is on the Bootcamp partition, the cloning process could take up to two hours to finish.

If in case you don't want to get into that mush technicalities you can use a data recovery mac software which will not only create a clone of the drive but will also recover you data if in case you find some of the data lost in the process.