To clone a hard drive, you will need a way to connect the second hard drive to your Mac. Our 2.5' Hard Drive Enclosure or one of our Hard Drive Upgrade Kits works great for cloning your drive over. To clone your hard drive, we recommend a program called SuperDuper!, by Shirt Pocket Software. Until macOS 10.15 Catalina, Mac users knew: their startup volume was a single volume, just as it appeared! (Okay, for Fusion drive users, there are two physical drives managed by software to.
Mac cloning is an efficient and reliable way to back up the contents of the hard drive and use them on another Mac based computer. In fact, if you clone a Mac on an external hard drive, you actually create its portable backup and you can use it to boot any Mac based machine. For this, simply hook up clone drive to another Mac and hold down the Option key while Mac is booting. Choose the clone drive as the bootable media at the run time and start using it if you are using your own Mac machine.
Introduction to Cloning
As you know, the term Cloning refers to the process that results in an exact replica of something, which has the same look, feel, and features as that of the original one. Likewise, cloning a computer results in another computer with the same look, feel, and features. However, the process does not really involve duplicating the entire machine, but only the hard drive that contains the overall data, including system files, applications, and user's data. Don't get confused cloning with Imaging
Clone Mac Hard Drive
‘Drive cloning refers to creating an exact replica of the primary drive, including the overall contents, in order to have a bootable backup of the Mac.'
When it comes to clone Mac drive, you might clone the entire hard drive or clone Mac volume (i.e. the boot volume) only. However, it actually depends on your requirements. Suppose you want to have an exact copy of your Mac in office, you need an external hard drive having storage capacity at least equal to or greater than that of the drive you want to clone. In contrast, cloning the boot volume requires only a separate volume that can be either on the same drive or on the secondary drive.
Cloning Requirements
Based on whether you want to clone the boot volume or the entire Mac drive, the requirements vary from a separate volume to a secondary hard drive with storage capacity at least equal to that of the original drive. Apart from the drive, a cloning tool is another key requirement that must be satisfied with no failure.
Before you begin with cloning, make sure the cloning tool is reliable and can perform the intended job efficiently. How to clean my macbook pro for free. Ensuring reliability as the base of a process is constructive and is in favor of the ongoing process. Suppose you use a random tool to clone a Mac on another Mac, the process might fail in between and the primary Mac machine may lead to failure or corruption in the hard drive.
Note: Since cloning tool is key of the process to finish up successfully, it must be reliable and have efficiency to perform the job in an intended manner.
Cloning Process
While you are ready for cloning, you need to be sure if the secondary drive is brand new or it has already been used with the Mac. For a brand new drive, you must undergo the steps to format a hard drive, as you cannot use it in RAW state for booting or even for data storage. See how to format a brand new drive on Mac:
Clone Macbook Hard Drive To Ssd
Format the Drive
- Install or attach the secondary drive to your Mac and click the Initialize button on Disk Insertion pop-up message.
- This launches Disk Utility; make sure the same drive is selected in the left pane, and the click the Erase tab in the right pane.
- Select Mac OS Extended (Jouranled) in the Format drop-down list and type-in a name for drive in the Name field.
- Click the Erase button start formatting the drive.
Clone Macbook Hard Drive To Ssd
Once drive formatting completes successfully, you will see that drive with the given name on the Mac desktop.
Select Partition Map Scheme Free studio software for windows 10.
- With the same drive selected in the left pane, click the Partition tab in the right pane.
- Click the Options button below the graphical view of the hard drive, and then you can choose a Partition Map Scheme amongst the provided options.
- Select GUID Partition Table on your Intel-based Mac, which enables all similar Macs boot from this drive.
- Click the OK button, and then click Apply to save the settings.
On your Intel-based Mac machine, selecting GUID Partition Table for this drive enables Mac machines with similar system configuration boot from it.
Drive Cloning
At this stage, you must have a reliable drive-cloning tool to proceed with the process, which you can download from the Internet. Alternatively, you may prefer using Disk Utility as the cloning tool with which you are obviously familiar enough. See how you can perform drive cloning with Disk Utility in Mac OS X.
- Launch Disk Utility from Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility and make sure the secondary drive is still connected to your Mac.
- Select your Mac drive (i.e. the primary drive) in the left pane and click the Restore tab in the right pane.
- Drag the primary drive from the left pane to the right, and then drop it in the Source field.
(In case the primary drive is already shown in the Source field at the right, you may bypass the step 3.)
- Likewise, drag the secondary drive from the left pane to the right and drop it in the Destination field.
- Click the Restore button to start drive cloning.
Macbook Pro Clone Hard Drive
Note: the process formats the secondary drive before copying the contents of the primary drive on it. Thus, make sure the secondary drive contains no data.
