Creating Bootable OS for Backup

1. Creating Bootable OS for Backup Today, we are going to discuss about one of the most ignored yet utterly vital aspect of owning a Mac – backing up your precious data. It is probably the worst situation to find yourself – with a crashed hard drive and no access to all your data. This probably means all your music, pictures collected over many years, all your digital documents and any important projects you were working on. In most cases, this means a permanent loss of data, unless you can afford data recovery services which are usually expensive. Moreover, data recovery does not come with a 100% guarantee – nobody can recover ALL of your data, at least no without damage. In such a situation, your only way out is a backup of your data from which you can restore everything you hold dear on your Mac and one of the best ways of doing that is via a software which can help you create said backups. And in this post, we will discuss how to use one of the most popular such suites for Mac – Carbon Copy Cloner. Carbon Copy Cloner is a backup software that can create bootable backups of your Mac – meaning that in the scenario where your Mac’s hard drive has crashed, you can simply boot up your Mac via a Carbon Copy Cloner backup without the hassle of data recovery. Installing Carbon Copy Cloner Grab your copy of Carbon Copy Cloner from Bombich.com and go ahead with the fairly simple install process. Post install, launch Carbon Copy Cloner to begin the backup process. Carbon Copy Cloner's Main Interface Carbon Copy Cloner’s GUI is fairly straightforward and simple. Make sure you select your Mac’s OS hard drive in “Source disk” and in “Target disk”, you select either an existing partition on your Mac, an external HDD or another Mac.

2. Press the “Clone” button, and post accepting the warning that pops up, your backup should begin. The backup process can take anything from twenty minutes to 2 hours depending on the size of your backup, and the type of connection in use (USB 2.0, USB 3.0 or Firewire). Booting From Your New Backup To do this, simply reboot your Mac and hold down the “Alt” (Option) key while your Mac powers on. In the consequent options, choose your new backup as the boot drive. Your Mac will boot up as usual, however USB backups can take longer to boot than backups on a hard drive partition. Beyond The Basics: Scheduling To avoid performing this process repetitively, you can simply schedule Carbon Copy Cloner backups. To create a schedule, follow the steps previously stated and on the final prompt, choose “Save task” rather than “Clone”. The “Schedule” window will appear, and you can now schedule hourly, daily, weekly and monthly backups. Note: In case your “Target disk” is an external USB, scheduled backups will occur only when that disk is connected. Beyond The Basics: Restoring From Your CCC Backup However, we keep backups for worst-case scenarios – like our Mac crashing with permanent corruption of the OS installation, along with loss of data. In such a case, simply boot up from your Carbon Copy Cloner backup and when booted up, run Carbon Copy Cloner. But be careful – this time you must choose your Carbon Copy Cloner backup as your “Source disk” and your original Mac partition as your “Target disk”. The rest of the process remains the same, and voila! In simply a span of a few minutes, your original Mac OS is up and running. To access it, simply reboot, hold the “Option” key and choose your Mac OS partition to boot up. Make sure to disconnect any external drives. Conclusion This post has covered only the basics of Carbon Copy Cloner, with a host of advanced features yet to be discussed, most significant of them being incremental backups – the ability to backup only the changes you have made since the last full backup, reducing your backup time and making the whole process highly efficient. Carbon Copy Cloner is highly recommended for anyone who wants to keep a bootable backup of their Mac handy for that I-hope-it-never-happens-to-you scenario. If you find it to awesome, just remember that it’s a donation-ware, so feel free to donate some money towards its continuous development.