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How to clone a drive/volume
Suppose you want to install a newer, faster drive in your MacBook Pro (or any Mac). This can be a very time-consuming task if you were to install a new system from scratch. Instead, clone the existing drive to the new one, then swap drives.
Cloning a volume makes an identical copy. Cloning is more than a backup, it’s a functionally-identical copy, a distinction that is particularly relevant for your boot drive (system and applications): you can start the Mac from the clone.
Be sure to consider the NewerTech Voyager Q drive dock, which accepts any 2.5" or 3.5" SATA drive in seconds, making clones and backup fast and convenient.
Connecting and initializing a new drive PERMALINK
You’ll need to connect the new drive to your Mac. With a bare drive to be installed internally (eg in a MacBook or MacBook Pro), it won’t have an enclosure (case); it will be a bare hard drive.
The Voyager Q drive dock comes to the rescue for bare hard drives: just insert the drive into the slot. You can also use the Voyager Q for a simple but cost effective backup strategy; it’s handy, and a worthwhile investment.
Alternately, the new drive might already be in its own enclosure for external use, connected (for example) via USB or Firewire. It doesn’t matter how it’s connected, so long as it is.
Erasing a brand-new drive
When a brand-new hard drive is connected, Mac OS X asks whether to initialize it.
Click to bring up Apple’s Disk Utility, erase the drive, then proceed with the clone.
Erasing will create a single volume (single partition) by default; you can partition the drive if there is a good reason to do so; in that case more than one volume will appear on your desktop.
To avoid confusion, choose a different name (at least temporarily) for the new volume(s). My boot drive is named , so the new one might be . Later, the name can be changed back to (eg if I’ve swapped drives).
Cloning the volume PERMALINK
The cloning process takes time in proportion to how much data is present, so clear out any files you don’t need, empty the trash, clear browser caches, etc before starting the clone.
Assuming you’ve cloned the boot volume, the clone will be capable of starting up your Mac.
If the goal was to upgrade your hard drive (say in a MacBook Pro), you can now swap the internal hard drive for new one one, reboot, and you’re back in business with the new drive! For example, you might clone from an internal 160GB hard drive to a new 500GB hard drive, yielding 3X the capacity and much faster speed, all with no affect on your system, and minimal downtime.
Cloning with Carbon Copy Cloner
Shown below is the window for Carbon Copy Cloner, one of several programs that can make bootable clones of your system drive (any drive can be cloned of course).
Select your existing drive (“Source Disk”) and select the new drive (“Target Disk”), then click the button. The process will take time proportional to how much data you have on the drives, the speed of each drive, etc. Figure 15 minutes or more in most cases.
Other uses for cloning PERMALINK
Cloning can also be a handy way of making a backup. Programs like Carbon Copy Cloner are even smart enough to offer a mode that copies only the files that have changed, greatly speeding up backups.
Setting the startup disk PERMALINK
After making a clone of your boot drive (system drive), you might want to boot off the clone.
Open , then choose to set the desired as the startup drive.
You might want to also disconnect or remove the older boot drive, to avoid confusion (this is why using different names is also a good idea).
