Cloning Mac drive - The best way to preserve data

Hard drive failure is a very common problem among computer users whether they are using Mac or Windows. This failure can cause issues like a permanent loss of data in your drive. In hard disk , physical crash or logical failures are uncertain and inevitable. There could be many reasons behind this. If a user doesn't have any backup of data, then the problem becomes really serious. In order to avoid such problems and to restore your precious data back , keeping backup is the best way to preserve data. Here we will discuss , significance of backup and the methods to create it.

How to keep backup?

“Backup is the process of making copies of data which may be used to restore the original one after losing it.”

You can create backup either in the form of image or clone. The major difference between these is , clone is bootable whereas image is a compressed form of data.

You can keep backup either by using disk utility or third party tool. Disk utility is an inbuilt feature of Mac which helps to take exact snapshot of your present hard drive. You can not create clone with the help of Disk utility. Here are the steps to create image of Mac drive with this utility.

1. Go to Applications, then Utilities and double-click on Disk Utility

2. Close any other open applications, and then select your Mac’s internal hard drive from the left-hand pane of Disk Utility.

3. Click on File in the toolbar, then select New then Disk Image from [your hard drive].

4. Name your Mac backup and then select your external drive as the destination from drop-down menu.

5. You can change the settings of image and make it read only, compressed, read/write or encryption settings also.

But, for general use we would recommend leaving them as the default setting of “compressed” image format and no encryption.

6. Click Save to start the process of creating the disk image on your external hard drive. This process will take some time, Disk Utility will notify you when the process is finished.

You can save disk image by keeping data in the form of 'Image'. Another useful aspect of disk images is that you can password-protect them and encrypt them to prevent an unauthorized authentication.

Cloning & imaging Mac drive with third party tool:-

Cloning is also a good method to create backup. You can easily reboot and restore your Mac system from clone created with Stellar Drive Clone. The coming version of this software is 2.0.

Features of this software:-

1. Create exact replica of your Mac Disk to another drive

2. Mac user can resize volumes at destination drive at the time of cloning.

3. An easy tool to create clone of selected volume to another volume, folder, or a network drive.

4. Supports cloning recovery HD at Mac OS X Lion

5. New version is now capable to support MBR partition.

6. It supports NTFS file system and Ex- FAT.

Below added image show the options of this software:-

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You can restore data from cloned or image file back. Cloning is considered as the reliable and affordable option to backup Mac OS and data and stay unaffected in data loss situation.