
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;
- 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.
- 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...
- Add your Macintosh hard drive, or your current startup drive to backuplist+ list window. Do not add any other files.
- 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...
- Drag the icon of the destination drive or volume into the destination text field or press "Browse" to locate it in Finder.
- Press "Backup"
- Backuplist+ will copy the hard drive contents to the destination disk. This could take from 30 minutes to several hours depending on size.
- 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.
- 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