Although I have a robust backup system (I back up to two external hard drives, located in two different places, and I have BackBlaze running on my Mac continuously), I believe I should add another layer of protection by learning how to clone my Mac.
I’ve never done this; any basic advice or outline of steps would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for your kind help.
You need Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper (there are probably others, but those are the most popular). Then you just set up a daily copy of your drive to a DAS. That’s it. If you need to restore, you go into migration assistant and point to the DAS.
I had to look that up; DAS means Directly-Attached Storage?
If your backups are up to date, I’d suggest to exercise the capability of restoring those backups instead.
If you feel you need another layer of protection after having 3 backups, then you are not trusting them and I think it’s useful to reflect about the deeper reason of that. As Darth Vader would say: “I find your lack of faith in your backups disturbing”.
Sorry, yes, just an external drive. It will not work with a NAS.
I think in this case, it’s just nice to know if your Mac’s drive dies, there is an easy way to get your Mac back up and running just the way it was before. Bootable backups used to take care of that, but those days are gone and this is the next best option.
My music and 20+ years of photos are backed up about 5 different ways. They are so important that I am leaving nothing to chance. Only one of those backups takes any effort from me, and I just hook up a drive every few weeks to do it.
If I’m understanding this right, I follow the same process I use for making backups using Time Machine to an external drive, but for cloning I can use Carbon Copy Cloner (which I own but have never used) and clone my Mac to another external drive that is not being used for regular backups.
Is that correct?
Also, what brand and type of SSD would you recommend? I’m running a 14" M1 Max MBP, 32GB. Here is my current storage:
Not really like Time Machine, since you have to do a bit more to get it set up and you have more control over it.
Get an SSD at least the size of your machine’s drive (so 1TB in your case), but if you get a bigger one you can run snapshots (but I really do not think this is important, but others here might correct me). Samsung is popular, the T7 is fast, but not amazingly so. I use a Samsung T7 and it does about 30GB in 20-30 seconds (I have never benchmarked it). This isn’t really something where speed is important though, so get an older T5 or whatever name brand SSD device you want. Stay away from brands you haven’t heard of and don’t buy from a 3rd party seller on Amazon. Only buy from reputable stores.
Format the drive using Disk Utility to APFS.
Open CCC, create a new backup. For the source, pick the root drive on your Mac (Macintosh HD) and set the destination as your external drive. Pick a time for it to run everyday.
Then forget about it, other than opening it in Finder once a month to check that everything looks normal. (It should look exactly the same as your Mac’s drive).
Now let’s say you take your computer in for service. They will wipe it. I have never had to do this, but you would hold down whatever key to go to the boot options, and select migration assistant. It will ask where, and you point it at your external drive.
Edit to add, since you have a laptop, it might be better to set up the backup as “when the drive is connected” that way every time you connect the drive, it will run. Of course then you have to remember to connect the drive. Ideally you want to have to do almost nothing for this to run.
Screen shot of mine:
ICYMI, modern Macs cannot be “cloned” in the iconic definition of a bit-for-bit image copy of the hard drive resulting in another physical drive that can just plug-in and boot if the primary drive fails.
Others can explain in more detail, but basically Apple’s increased hardware/software security mechanisms prevent creating true clones except for older systems / older system software.
We can still make backups using many different methods, and quickly recover to just about the same state using migration assistant and other tools, but one must first install a pristine macOS on a new, or rebuilt Mac first and then restore the data/status from the backups.
I agree with you, but you can’t put a price on peace of mind!
For me, my 2 local backups (1 Time Machine, 1 clone) and 1 offsite backup (BackBlaze) is plenty. And also all my files live in OneDrive, as well. But that’s just me!
This was very helpful, thank you!
