"Here are instructions for using the Terminal Application instructions to Clone your MAC OS to another drive," says David Passell. He then capitalizes this WARNING, " It totally erases the destination drive so don't make a mistake." See here.
More on Cloning a Hard Drive
Our Prez Art Gorski shares his experiences with cloning, "I've used SuperDuper before to clone a hard drive before installing a new OS version from DVD. After the clone is made, I reboot the computer from the clone and log in to make sure it works properly.
"Then I totally wipe the internal hard drive (yikes!) and install a totally fresh copy of the OS, which will eliminate all the cruft on the previous install.
Then I use migration assistant to move everything from the clone to the new OS install. Ta da! A perfect upgrade with no junk from the previous internal drive. Of course, in the brave new world of Lion, this isn't as easy to do anymore."
So continues our on-going look at cloning. More input from PMUG members?
Cloning a Hard Drive
Jim Hamm reports on his latest experience. "After 4 - 1/2 years of using a Mac I finally decided to clone the SSD drive on my new MacBook Air. I've used Time Machine faithfully, but never a clone. After reading about cloning and talking to various people, I decided to purchase SuperDuper which costs $28.
"For the drive I purchased LaCie's Rugged Mini 500GB external 7200rpm hard drive. Cheaper drives can be found, but I wanted one that would withstand the rigors of travel.
"The clone of my storage drive took 25 minutes with Super Duper (SD). When I first got the LaCie drive I formatted it to OS X (journaled) but found out I didn't need to do that. SD erases the drive first, before starting the clone. A day or so after the clone I had installed some other programs on my Mac and wanted to do an update to be sure I didn't lose them in case of a drive failure. SD provides a full set of operating instructions, and after reading what to do, I started SD to do a 'Smart Update,' which recognizes all the changes one has made and clones them. The 'Smart Update' took 4 minutes.
"Well, will SD work when I need it? I hope so, and hope never to find out. One of the bloggers that I read frequently, John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame, recently lost his hard drive. He said that SD got him back in business very quickly. He has had occasion to use SD more than once. As the speaker at the PMUG meeting said yesterday, a hard drive will fail eventually. It's nice to know one's programs, pictures, research, etc., are safely cloned and ready for resurrection when needed.
"My next step will be to do a clone of Zee's MacBook Pro, as she has lots of pictures and genealogy research she wouldn't want to lose."
Compare SuperDuper and CarbonCopyCloner
It's important to backup what you've got on your computer. But what's the best way? John Carter compares two programs. "What’s the difference between SuperDuper! (SD) and CarbonCopyCloner (CCC)?
"In a word, money. But there is more.
"Either SD or CCC are okay for cloning the entire internal hard drive to an external hard drive for saving a full backup for emergencies. Such a clone can be booted from, and you can restore your internal drive from that clone up to the point that the clone was created. I suspect that SD is winning out over CCC for cloning. However, you can’t use all the features of SD without purchasing it.
"A major functional difference between SD and CCC is that SD always does a full erase of the target disk and CCC never does a full erase of the target disk. Making a clone with CCC requires that you first use Disk Utility to format the target drive. After the clone is created, you really should be using CCC to keep your clone updated if you’re not using Time Machine.
"Another difference is that SD will clone either the entire source or just /Users on the source. With CCC you can select the files and folders you want to backup, and this is most helpful for performing incremental backups.
(Click on each illustration to enlarge.)
"Setting up the options for either one doesn’t give you any warm feeling that you will have a bootable copy when it’s done, but my recent experience with SD is that after you click on Copy it gives you a laundry list of things it will do and it includes a notice that it will set the target disk to be bootable. CCC just tells you its done. If you started with a properly formatted drive (one partition, Mac OS journaled), you won’t have any problems booting from it if all the system files are on the drive.
"Be aware that booting from a USB drive and launching applications from same is painfully slow."