best free hard drive cloning software for mac

In addition to the computing benefits from cloning, its popularity has arisen partly from the simplicity involved in cloning the contents of one drive to another. You take everything with you, without having to lug around a laptop. This will ensure you have the proper programs installed, and you won't have to worry about strange settings that might interfere with your work flow. For instance, if you have Macintosh computers available in several locations, instead of transferring files back and forth between them, you can clone your drive to a portable external disk and then boot off of it from every machine you work on.

This means that in the event of a hardware failure or major software corruption you can immediately boot off the cloned drive and be running again in a matter of seconds.īeyond bootability, cloning also can make your work highly portable. Unlike conventional backup systems such as Time Machine, which keep multiple versions of files and track changes over time, cloning only makes one copy of the files on a disk however, it does have one major advantage in that the clone is bootable.

Various MacFixIt articles references this, and it is advocated in discussion forums and other places as an alternate means of backing up the hard drive before performing system maintenance, system alterations, or software upgrades. Many troubleshooting guides include recommendations for 'cloning' your system's boot drive. Cloning a hard drive is when you create an exact copy of one drive's contents to another, which has been made quite simple with the availability of high-capacity external drives, simple connectivity, and highly developed cloning software.

Best free hard drive cloning software for mac