
Luckily! Two simple and practical solutions will be shown below. Maybe you would ask how to clone a hard drive in Windows or Mac. Usually we use it to upgrade current hard drive or do a disk backup. You can do the same process in reverse if you need to copy the files back over, or restore the backup should your computer decide to break.As you may know, hard drive clone is the course of copying all contents from one hard drive to another via cloning software or hardware.

Any settings you change or files you save there won’t be reflected on your primary installation. You can use your Mac as normal, but keep in mind that it’s separate from the installation on your main internal hard drive. This brings up the boot switcher and lets you boot from the external hard drive. This can take fairly long, depending on the speed of your external drive and its connection to your Mac, so it’s best to have a fast hard drive with Thunderbolt, USB-C, or USB 3.0 connections.Īnd that’s it! When Disk Utility is done, you can shut down your Mac and hold down Option when booting it back up. You can also choose an ISO image, but that doesn’t have much use here.Ĭlick “Restore,” and Disk Utility will start the copying process. Select your external drive in the sidebar, click “Restore” in the menu, and then select your main drive as the “Restore From” option. It’s intended to be used from Recovery mode to restore your hard drive after a failure.īut, if you choose your external drive as the restore target, you can flip that action around and copy files from your main drive to the backup. The “Restore” button in Disk Utility will copy the files from a backup to your main drive. Here’s where we get to that hidden feature we mentioned.


You’ll be greeted with a list of all of your volumes, including your internal hard drive (probably called OS X or Macintosh HD) and your external hard drive.

How to Clone Mac hard drive using disk utilityįire up Disk Utility from Spotlight (Command+Space) or the Utility folder in your applications.
