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Backing up your whole hard drive

 

Making a bootable clone of your entire hard drive is easy with backuplist+. Rsync 3 will preserve all important file metadata and create exact copies. You will need a good external hard drive, partiton or volume. Ideally it should be erased, clean and formatted correctly - see Preparing a Disk for backup...

To create a bootable copy of your Macintosh Hard drive;

  1. It is a good idea to repair permissions on your own hard drive before a full system clone. (Use Disk utility > Repair Disk Permissions.) You can set the pre-clone behavior of backuplist+ in the settings panel to erase the destination and/or repair permissions prior to copying. See Clone Settings and Automation for more on this.
  2. Be sure the destination drive has "Ignore ownership on this volume" unchecked! Go to Get Info for the disk icon and un-check the box at bottom in permissions section. More on this...
  3. Add your Macintosh hard drive, or your current startup drive to backuplist+ list window. Do not add any other files.
  4. If you are doing a clean install, erase the destination disk or partition - a clean slate is best for the first clone run. See the clone settings for more...
  5. Drag the icon of the destination drive or volume into the destination text field or press "Browse" to locate it in Finder.
  6. Press "Backup"
  7. Backuplist+ will copy the hard drive contents to the destination disk. This could take from 30 minutes to several hours depending on size.
  8. To "boot" from the new backup, go to System Preferences > Startup Disk and select the appropriate one and click "Restart...". Always check to see if the backup works and is truly a startup disk - otherwise it is useless if there is crash and you need to restore from there.
  9. Note: You can also exclude items from the backup using the Exclude list in the Preferences panel. See more on the exclude list....

See also

Other user preferences

Creating backup sets