Unfortunately, you can’t make a clone merely by copying files from your startup volume to an external drive in the Finder. OS X Recovery features include Disk Utility, but sometimes you need a drive-repair app with more oomph.) Finally, having a clone is essential when upgrading to a new version of OS X, because it gives you the option to easily revert to your previous system (by erasing your upgraded-OS drive and then restoring from the clone) if compatibility problems arise. By contrast, even though Time Machine also backs up every file on your drive, restoring all those files to a new drive takes hours (or possibly days) restoring an entire drive from an online backup service takes even longer.Ī clone also comes in handy for troubleshooting, because you can use it to run third-party utilities on your ailing drive. A few moments later, you’re back up and running-and you can then repair (or replace) your main startup drive more or less at your leisure.

You simply attach your clone drive, restart while holding down the Option key, select the clone drive in OS X’s Startup Manager, and press Return. Is there a good third party app for macOS that can do what I do in windows?What a clone offers that the likes of Time Machine and CrashPlan do not is immediate recovery: You can get back to work almost instantly after a drive crash or other severe problem with your startup volume. Macrium reflect in windows would have taken maybe 2 minutes at a MUCH faster output speed and it would only make an image from the data USED (2 GB), and on top of that it would compress it with a REALLY good ratio so it would have been like a 1.6 GB image done in 2 minutes instead of a 16gb image done in 23 minutes in disk utility on Mac. Not only did it take a whopping 22 minutes at 13 mb/s, it made a 16GB image even though only 2 GB is used. I tested making an image of 16GB flash drive in disk utility. Several people recommended the native Disk Utility in macOS to do backup/cloning and I found it to be horrible. It does amazing compression ratios, its super fast, it can make its own format of images that are read/write and mount very quickly in windows.īut recently I use my 2019 MacBook Pro Touch Bar more than my pc and I’d rather not have to turn on my windows computer every time I want to clone backup my drives once a month or whatever I do. First off the personal use version is free and the basic features in this version are fine for me. For most of my backup needs I’ve used Macrium Reflect on windows which is AMAZING.

Mac disk clone tool