Creating a Backup Copy or Clone of Mac HD

By John on November 3, 2009 1:26 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It's time to revisit the popular Carbon Copy Cloner program that allows you to create an exact copy of your source machine onto an external hard drive.

I recently tested this by backing up my Mac Book Pro running Snow Leopard. It took about 1 1/2 hours to back up 80 Gigs to my portable pocket drive running at 5400 RPM.

The latest version also allows you to create incremental backups that can be scheduled. You can even back everything up to a remote Mac on a Network. To create a backup of your entire sytstem, just hook up an external drive and set it as the target. That's it!

To test the copy, you can boot your Mac directly off the external drive by holding down the option key while you restart your Mac. This will allow you to choose your external drive as the new Boot Drive.

Okay, so how must does this software cost? Guess what, it's free! Yes, you read that correctly. Bombich Software makes this very clear by running an occasional banner within the software program. I recommend that you donate to Bomich Software for this amazing program.

If you plan on cloning several machines using Carbon Copy Cloner there's one catch. Keep in mind those machines will be EXACT copies of each other. This means, they will inherent all the same user names and passwords. They'll also have all the same programs with the same serial numbers. This means, you may have reset the serial numbers on certain software products that have license restrictions.