How to clone my MacBooks hard-drive?

macos tips
1

Hi, I have been trying to figure out how to clone my MacBook hard drive. It has OSX, plus Bootcamp and XP Pro partitions. My destination drive is an exact duplicate physical drive in an external USB enclosure. I want to clone the entire internal drive to the external drive, including all partitions and boot data. The Disk Utility, even when booted from CD, only supports cloning individual partitions. SuperDuper and other utilities seem to work the same. I tried the Linux tool, G4L, and it did not recognize the external USB drive. I am trying to clone so that if the internal drive ever croaks, I can just drop in the drive that is currently in the external case - and have no downtime. I only need to back up my machine this way once a month, so it doesn’t matter how long the process takes - as long as it works! Any suggestions?

2

  1. Partition your external drive using Disk Utility to the same sizes and file formats as your internal drive

  2. Boot your MBP into MacOS and clone the internal OS X partition to the external OS X partition using SuperDuper or the equivalent

  3. Boot your MBP into Windows and clone the internal Windows partition to the external Windows partition using Ghost or the equivalent

You’ll then have a swappable HDD.