What if one thing goes unsuitable and also you want fast entry on-site to a full backup of your Mac’s startup quantity or an exterior drive, and that you must return to work as quickly as potential? The introduction of Apple silicon made it troublesome to create a drive you could possibly swap in and begin up from, however that shouldn’t cease you from making a backup that can get you again in enterprise. (There are workarounds, nevertheless it requires ongoing effort.)
The most suitable choice to have an almost hot-swappable copy of your most vital regionally saved information is a clone. A clone is a precise copy of the present state of a quantity–a snapshot, actually. Time Machine gives a type of this functionality, nevertheless it additionally archives older information. You possibly can configure cloning software program simply to maintain an up-to-date copy of the drive you need to mirror and nothing further.
I’ve relied on Carbon Copy Cloner or CCC ($49.99) for years. It helps cloning and numerous associated options, like archiving. An alternate is SuperDuper! ($27.95), which is extra tightly targeted on quantity cloning. With apps, you decide a supply (sometimes a quantity) and a vacation spot, set a schedule, and configure fiddly choices, like verifying information after copying in CCC.
Cloning enables you to use a drive that’s no larger than the drive you’re copying from for cloning, in contrast to Time Machine and archiving modes in different backup software program, which want house to retailer a number of variations of information over time. (Time Machine all the time archives older information till a backup quantity begins to fill, after which it purges the oldest variations of archived information first.)
I’ve discovered that cloning software program has a bonus in reliability over Time Machine, which shops information in date-stamped snapshots. In case your startup quantity dies and your Mac remains to be working, you need to use an exterior drive, set up macOS on it, and use Migration Assistant throughout setup to import information. Nevertheless, I’ve had issues on a number of events the place Migration Assistant received’t acknowledge what appears to be an up-to-date Time Machine copy of my startup quantity. I’ve turned to a cloned backup of that quantity, which works compatibly with Migration Assistant and doesn’t appear to fail in the identical circumstances. I’ve been grateful that I had this additional copy.
A Macworld reader requested particularly about establishing a shortly accessible exterior drive in case the drive they saved their Photographs library on failed. Might they swap instantly to a clone that’s been saved updated on the opposite drive? Sure, and it’s an ideal objective for a clone.
In that state of affairs, you could possibly give up Photographs (if it hadn’t already instructed you of an issue and give up), eject the failing drive, launch Photographs whereas holding down Possibility, and choose the Photographs Library file on the cloned drive. Relying on how incessantly you’ve gotten the clone operation set, you would possibly lose little or no work. With iCloud Photographs enabled, you’d additionally must set the cloned library as your System Library in > Photographs > Settings > Common by clicking Use as System Picture Library.
You may as well drill down with clones, copying simply a part of a quantity as a substitute of the entire thing. I had a Photographs library meltdown in 2021 that took me hours to get well from after which days to get again to regular. One thing in my Photographs Library bundle corrupted so badly that even restoring from a Time Machine backup failed. Ultimately, I needed to rebuild from scratch and let Photographs sync with iCloud to retrieve all my photos and movies. Vowing to not let that occur once more, I setup a nightly clone of my regionally saved Photographs Library bundle to a high-capacity exterior exhausting drive. Whereas the exhausting drive is sluggish, the clone replace occurs in a single day, so it doesn’t overlap with my daytime work.
Foundry
As a result of a simple clone doesn’t allow you to go backward, I strongly advise you to have at the very least a pair different types of backups. Time Machine is the simplest for a Mac proprietor. Add to that Backblaze or one other encrypted, on-line backup service. Or, when you’re preserving all of your paperwork and pictures in a syncing service–iCloud Photographs/iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive/Google Photographs, and so forth.–you may lean on that as your second backup.
This Mac 911 article is in response to a query submitted by Macworld reader Michael.
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