There are many reasons why a user would want to create a clone of their Mac’s hard drive. One reason why people clone the hard drive is because they are upgrading from a smaller storage hard drive to a larger capacity hard drive. Another very common reason is when Mac users are upgrading from a hard disk drive to s faster solid state drive.
No matter why you want to clone your hard drive in Mac, you can use Carbon Copy Cloner for making fully bootable clones of your system hard drive. It is not a free software, but can be freely used for 30 days.
Here is how you can clone your Mac’s hard drive easily in just a few steps using Carbon Copy Cloner:
- Download and install Carbon Copy Cloner from https://bombich.com/.
- Attach the destination storage device on which you want to clone your Mac’s hard drive.
- Launch Carbon Copy Cloner, click on Source and then select your macOS hard drive (or solid state drive).
- Click on Destination and select the storage device on which you want to clone Mac’s hard drive.
- In the filter under the source section, select Copy All Files and then click on the Clone button.
- Before your cloning starts, it will ask you to install CCC privileged helper tool. This is necessary for the cloning to complete. You will have to supply Mac login credentials in this step.
- The cloning will start and might take a very long time. You will see a progress of cloning and files being copied in the Carbon Copy Cloner window. When the task is finished, you will have an exact clone of your Mac’s hard drive. The clone is bootable and can be used to boot into macOS easily.
Chances are that you want to make the clone on an external USB hard drive or SSD. You would get better results if you use USB 3.x compatible device. Avoid using any USB 2.0 pendrives as they tend to become very slow when so much data is being copied.