How to Make Full Clone of Mac’s Hard Drive

The golden rule of data safety these days is to keep making backups regularly. Once you have made a backup of your important files and cloned hard drives, you can call yourself well protected even in the case of disasters, fire, theft, malware attacks, or ransomware infections. No matter what happens, you have the important data backed up in a safe location somewhere in your house, in a strong box or in a bank vault.

Because of this habit, when I tried to make a clone of the SSD that comes in the Macbook Air, I was surprised that it is so extremely easy. For cloning your Mac’s hard disk drive or SSD, we can use a freeware SuperDuper! and here is how it is done:

  1. Download and install SuperDuper! on your Mac from https://www.shirt-pocket.com/.
  2. Attach your destination storage device to your Mac. In my case, it was an external USB 3.0 hard disk drive. This storage device will be erased, so ensure that you backup any important files on it before proceeding.
  3. Launch SuperDuper! Select your macOS SSD or HDD as the Copy source. Select your external USB drive as the destination. Choose to Backup – all files and finally click on the Click Now button.SuperDuper Backup macOS
  4. The process might take anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes depending on how much data you have stored on your Mac. During this process, it will format your destination storage drive, copy all the files from your Mac to that drive, update recovery and make it bootable.SuperDuper Backup macOS

Because SuperDuper! makes the destination drive bootable, you can actually use it to boot into macOS directly without actually needing the original Mac HDD or SSD. We can use this process when we are trying to migrate from older storage drives to new ones. It is also an excellent way to keep a backup of your original macOS installation for later use.