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When you hear someone around you suffered from data loss, you become mindful and take a turn to a secure way. In fact, I appreciate your act of taking the right steps before the disaster strikes your Mac. However, since a disaster may strike anytime and cause data loss to anyone, you cannot consider yourself on the safe side unless you have an updated backup of all the crucial files stored at a location that is safer than your Mac at least.
Many users save their crucial files on external drives in order to have a backup copy of every single crucial file, while many ones prefer uploading them to their mail server. Well, choosing the email server as the backup zone is quite safe and quite frankly even I do it many times, as they are then globally accessible to me. The same concept is used in cloud storage – the best place for data backup.
Data Backup
“The term ‘data backup’ refers to a copy of every single file that is crucial saved at a safe location, and is intended to be used when the original file is not longer available or is lost.”
Well, the definition itself is inspiring and it prompts me to go for data backup, especially because I have seen my friend losing his personal collection of photos due to a missing volume.
The term Data Backup does not enlighten you about keeping backup copies of your crucial files saved on an external storage media (such as a hard drive), but it brings an idea to use some means to do it. In fact, with this I am looking forward to introduce the requirement of data backup software that does the intended task without bothering you in any sense.
Data Backup Software
When it comes to choosing a smart data backup tool, the most significant option you might find is Time Machine, the Mac OS X inbuilt data backup utility, which implements incremental approach for data backup.
Time Machine enables you back up the entire hard drive or its selected volumes containing crucial data. However, you have to configure or set backup preferences accordingly. Once you are done configuring the Time Machine on Mac, it performs a full backup of the selected drive(s) successfully. After an hour of a successful backup, it repeats the backup process and this time it targets only the recently created or updated files.
In fact, Time Machine executes its backup loop after an interval of an hour after a successful backup. While configuring the Time Machine, the most important thing you must remind of is that it requires a spare drive to save the backup files. Luckily, Time Machine facilitates choosing an internal, external, or a Time Capsule as the backup drive.
Drive Cloning – the Better Alternative to Backup
Data backup techniques might assure you about security of your data; however, backup techniques are trustworthy but not when your Mac is not able to boot. In fact, you cannot be too much reliant on a backup drive because a hard drive may crash anytime and cause a huge loss of data. Besides, if your Mac fails to boot from the primary boot volume, you no longer can restore data from the backup drive.
Drive cloning on the other hand has an upper hand and the technique is reliable as well as productive. The most important thing is that your data remains accessible, no matter if the Mac machine can boot from the Macintosh HD (i.e. the boot volume) or not. Stellar Drive Clone is a commercial tool that is very much easy and reliable to carry out the intended operation with. Thus, I suggest going for drive clone instead of backing up your crucial files individually manually or using a backup tool like Time Machine just to save the money.
Requirements for Cloning
As per the criteria for cloning the Mac drive, you must have a spare hard drive for cloning and make sure the secondary drive is larger or at least equal in size as compared to the Mac drive. Mentioned below are a few other requirements that must meet for cloning:
- The Partition Map Scheme used for the secondary drive must be same as that of the Mac drive
- The File System the secondary drive is formatted with must be same as that of the Mac drive
Apart from this, the major criteria that must meet for Mac cloning is a commercial cloning tool. Make sure that the cloning tool you are going to use is reliable, and most importantly, is compatible with your Mac machine.
Cloning Mac Drive
Drive Cloning refers to creating a copy of your Mac drive along with the data on another drive based on certain criteria. In fact, hard drive cloning results in bootable backup of your Mac (i.e. you can directly boot from the clone drive as well). You can also use the clone drive instead of the Mac drive. In other words, you have a portable copy of your Mac as the clone drive.
Once you clone your Mac on an external drive with Stellar Drive Clone, you just need to connect the clone drive to a Mac and hold down the ALT key when it is booting, and then choose clone drive as the bootable drive. In case you clone your Mac, you actually create its portable copy that you can use to access your Mac data at any time.