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Best Disk Cloning Software for Mac


onelegend
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I've been working on installing Lion, but things always screw up once I install 10.7.2

 

Is there a good piece of software that will let me back up an image of my Mac Partition to an external HD, then if something goes wrong, let me boot to a CD or something an restore that image?

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The only issue with CCC or SuperDuper is that they don't have a Boot CD that the OP seems keen on. Also, and this may have changed, your bootloader will not be backed up. In both these situations it is therefore necessary to have a separate bootable drive in order to restore the image and reinstall the bootloader. Or to use whatever method was used previously to boot into an install environment to utilise Disk Utility to restore and then use the same boot method to get the actual restored install going before reinstalling the bootloader.

 

This isn't as bad as it sounds and we've all done the steps necessary to get an OSX install in the first place but it is often easier to get back to a known state by being able to use a boot CD. The two pieces of software I know that are capable of imaging the drive and restoring from a bootable CD are Clonezilla and Paragon Hard Disk Manager Suite 2011. Both recognise the HFS+ file system and can back it up, bootloader and all (EFI partition too if used) to an image and restore it easily. Paragon can also do differential backups but I haven't tested that out a great deal. Unfortunately neither of them offer a particularly great or intuitive UI (indeed Clonezilla is text based) but they do the job and may be what the OP is after.

 

Both types of backup have their pros and cons but I just thought I would throw it out there as a possibility.

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