Create a Bootable, External Clone of your Mac

Posted by Dan Booring on 09/18/07 in Featured, Home & Personal, Office, Organization, Utilities

Backup now not later! Our friends over at Lifehacker, are running a great tutorial on how to use SuperDuper (an application we’ve covered before) to copy your Mac’s entire drive onto an external drive. If your drive fails, you can boot your Mac from the external copy without missing a beat. This is a project that we have written about in the past and one that I recommend you undertake. I don’t have a ton of new information to offer outside of the LifeHacker tutorial (which is good) except to point out that there’s another great application, Carbon Copy Cloner, which will help you do the same thing and–unlike SuperDuper–is pure freeware, instead of shareware. Of course, you get what you pay for, and SuperDuper does a lot more as a backup application than Carbon Copy Cloner. So check them both out and see which you like.

The main idea; of course, is that there are only two kinds people in the world: those who have lost data and those who will lose data. If you do not have a backup plan already in place, go read this heart-breaking story and download a backup application. Everyone should be serious about protecting their data. Really. Go now. It is that important.

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Joe said on

September 18th, 2007 at 10:10 am

According to the “heart breaking story” The device that failed on him was a LaCie BigDisk. Here at work we have had several LaCie drives completely fail on us. Both hard drives and DVD burners. In the comments to the story that seems to be par for the course with LaCie.

Do you have any recommendations, either by experience, testing or other sources, that would recommend a hardy backup drive? It would be a shame to go through all the work of securing a copy of my machine, only to have the backup fail as well.

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Dan Booring said on

September 18th, 2007 at 11:06 am

I have used Western Digital drives pretty exclusively for the last several years and never had a problem. I have had external drives fail, but the culprit is usually the enclosure and not the hard disk itself. When I re-seated the drive or pulled it out and put it in another enclosure, it always worked fine.

Miles Evans said on

September 18th, 2007 at 11:18 am

I’m a bit put off why people gush over Lacie enough to be willing to pay double price for something that at the end of the day is still just a hard drive. Anyways…

@Joe: My recommendation is to buy a firewire 400/800/eSATA capable enclosure from Vantec or another maker and drop in any drive you like. The reason the Lacie drives you mention are failing has to do with the drives they are using. This way you can use whatever drive you like from Fujitsu, Hitachi, Seagate, Maxtor or Western Digital, after making sure users are not reporting faults with them. You will also likely save a bit of cash.

Keep in mind that this solution doesn’t offer any redundancy unless you use a RAID 1 capable enclosure and two drives. You might want to check out the Western Digital My Book drives that seem to be really popular and fairly priced.

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Indra said on

September 18th, 2007 at 11:59 am

Great one! I was just asking about a backup solution in Mac. Anyway, anyone know how do I backup both the OSX and the separate Data HDD? I’ve partitioned my HDD into two (PC habit) and of course, I want to backup both.

Dan Booring said on

September 18th, 2007 at 12:38 pm

@ Indra:

…anyone know how do I backup both the OSX and the separate Data HDD? I’ve partitioned my HDD into two (PC habit) and of course, I want to backup both.

Well, since both are partitions of the same drive, all you would do is clone them separately, treating them as different volumes.

Indra said on

September 19th, 2007 at 12:08 am

Dan:

Thanks, I’ll try that out.

avinator said on

October 19th, 2007 at 12:16 pm

WD drives rock ! the best !

I use super duper I swear by it… I really like the “smart update”