This brings up the boot switcher and lets you boot from the external hard drive. This can take fairly long, depending on the speed of your external drive and its connection to your Mac, so it’s best to have a fast hard drive with Thunderbolt, USB-C, or USB 3.0 connections.Īnd that’s it! When Disk Utility is done, you can shut down your Mac and hold down Option when booting it back up. You can also choose an ISO image, but that doesn’t have much use here.Ĭlick “Restore,” and Disk Utility will start the copying process. Select your external drive in the sidebar, click “Restore” in the menu, and then select your main drive as the “Restore From” option. It’s intended to be used from Recovery mode to restore your hard drive after a failure.īut, if you choose your external drive as the restore target, you can flip that action around and copy files from your main drive to the backup. The “Restore” button in Disk Utility will copy the files from a backup to your main drive. Here’s where we get to that hidden feature we mentioned. You’ll be greeted with a list of all of your volumes, including your internal hard drive (probably called OS X or Macintosh HD) and your external hard drive.
#Clone mac hard drive disk utility how to
How to Clone Mac hard drive using disk utilityįire up Disk Utility from Spotlight (Command+Space) or the Utility folder in your applications. Intel Macs can boot from external FireWire or USB drives, PowerPC Macs require FireWire drives.You can use an internal or external drive for the clone, with external being more common and flexible.The cloning process erases the destination drive, copies all files from the source drive, then makes the clone drive bootable.The disk should be large enough to hold all data on the source drive with at least 10GB to spare it’s generally best to use a disk the same size (or larger) as the volume being cloned.You need a separate hard disk or partition for the clone.