Be Safe, Clone Your Hard Drive

September 19, 2006 · 8 comments

Derek has written a thorough tutorial showing Mac users the basics of cloning their hard drive. With an effective hard drive clone, if your primary drive ever goes down you can just boot from your clone, whether it be a second internal hard drive in your Mac Pro or an external Firewire drive. He also covers the software that can make it all happen.

{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Glenn Wolsey September 20, 2006 at 12:40 am

What’s your backup solution Paul? How are you set-up against data loss?

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2 Elliott Back September 20, 2006 at 12:44 am

Isn’t some kind of parity disk and an array of data disks a better solution than brute duplication?

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3 Paul Stamatiou September 20, 2006 at 12:45 am

At the moment, I’m not. But I recently backed up my iTunes music via the built-in disc backup thing however that didn’t backup playlists for me so I just backed up the entire directory to an external hard drive. I made ISO’s of all my main applications and have them on an external hard drive if I should ever need to reformat and reinstall them. For my site, I have tons of backups… daily SQL dumps, frequent theme backups and entire server backups.

I could lose everything on my computer and I’d only miss the music. Everything else I can download again. Things I purchase, I keep the serials in my gmail so I can just search for them and download the app again.. things like SubEthaEdit, AppZapper, Transmit and the such.

As for my bookmarks, I keep all those “random” links on del.icio.us and my browser only has the essential 25 or so.

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4 Paul Stamatiou September 20, 2006 at 12:47 am

Yes, Elliott that would be the best way, not necessarily the easiest way. :-P Setting up a parity disk on for example an external hard drive to use on your iMac will be a bit of a challenge for most users. If you can explain it easily though, I’d love to see a kickass tutorial.

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5 msbob January 13, 2009 at 12:38 pm

Buy a Drobbo. The easiest way to setup a parity RAID. So easy, anyone can do it. Drives are not only hot swappable, but you can mix and match drive sizes. The tradeoff is cost.

http://www.drobo.com/Products/drobodemo.html

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6 Montoya September 20, 2006 at 6:55 pm

How about an article on cloning your hard drive for Windows?

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7 pasteler0 September 20, 2006 at 8:25 pm

I was thinking about this this week actually!
But now I’m on a windows, and as Montoya asked, you can backup an windows partition using linux. I don’t remember how , but you can google and find!

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8 pasteler0 September 23, 2006 at 12:09 am

The PowerQuest Drive Image does it for windows.

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