How To Clone Your Mac

You will need to download and install SuperDuper. You can use it for free to make manual backups of your drive, or you can register your copy for $27.95 to unlock additional features like scheduling and smart updates. Once you download, you can install it by dragging Super Duper into your Applications folder. You will need a dedicated drive or at least a hard drive partitioned into two drives, as Super Duper will erase the partition and make it its own. We recommend an external hard drive such as the Western Digital WD Elements 1 TB Hard Drive.

Select a source drive (your primary hard drive) and a destination drive (partition you want to use as your bootable clone). You can select “Copy Now” to begin the copy process.

Or you can click the “Schedule” button to setup a schedule to automatically erase and copy a new bootable mac hard drive partition. The schedule option requires you register your copy of Super Duper. But the advantage is you can setup the program to create a new clone each month so you always have a good, working drive to boot from.

When you’re ready, click “Copy Now” and Super Duper will begin making a bootable clone of your hard drive. In the event of an emergency, boot to the installation disk and specify the Super Duper drive as the boot disk using the Disk Utilities.

Do I Need This If I Run Time Machine

The short answer is no. But it really depends on your setup. Time Machine is great for daily backups, but it’s nice to have a separate hard drive dedicated as another clean source to boot from. If you have expensive programs on your mach hard drive, or any other data you would be devastated to lose, run the free version of Super Duper on a different drive for added peace of mind.