One drive is my boot disk, the second is a clone that gets daily incremental updates, and the third contains my Time Machine data.

I use both methods on my Mac Pro with multiple internal drives. A clone is bootable and contains a single snapshot of your system a Time Machine archive is not bootable but contains multiple versions of your files. It also allows you to carry your virtual computer with you on a portable hard drive.Ĭloning and incremental backups make good complements to archival backups like Time Machine. This capability offers great mitigation against hardware failure, especially in a business with multiple similar Macs. You can use the clone of an iMac to boot a MacBook, or an XServe clone to boot a Mac Mini (albeit with a slight difference in performance). This is often a good compromise in a small business situation when regular incremental updates of each clone aren’t needed.Ī clone isn’t tied to one particular machine, it can boot any Macintosh which supports the installed version of Mac OS X. One drive can be used to store clones of multiple Macs, each on it’s own partition.

If you run into problems you can then boot off your clone and keep working, then when time permits you can perform more troubleshooting, or erase and reclone the older system back to the primary drive. It’s worth cloning your Mac before you install any major updates to Mac OS X, QuickTime or major business and productivity applications. You can easily find and copy files as needed. No special software is needed to read the files on a clone, it’s just another Mac hard drive. The clone and subsequent incremental updates serve as a backup of your data. I typically run interim backups daily, or as necessary after making changes to my system. I suggest making full clones of your Mac every 3 to 6 months. I use ChronoSync to handle disk backups for my business clients.

This handy utility works with both local and networked systems, offers sophisticated logging and filtering options, and can be scheduled for automatic operation. menu:Īnother good program for performing incremental backups is ChronoSync. In SuperDuper! the option is called Smart Update, and is available under the Options.

Clone disk mac