Hard Drive Cloning for Mac and PC
Copying or “cloning” an entire hard disk can be useful for a number of reasons: you might want to backup your current operating system and all your data in order to add a larger hard drive to your laptop or desktop computer and thus have more free space. Or you might want to clone or “image” the hard drive for backup/disaster recovery purposes.
Backing up your data is a good first start, but what if you want to be able to easily restore the entire operating system just as you had it, with all the installed applications and exact same configurations? There are solutions available for both Mac and PC:
For Windows XP (or Vista, etc.), there is a free option and a paid option:
The free option for hard drive cloning for Windows is DriveImage XML.
The paid options are either Acronis True Image 11 or Symantc’s Ghost: I prefer the Acronis
solution personally, and you can download a free trial here
.
For Mac OS X, SuperDuper! is an excellent program. If you’re running Leopard (OS 10.5.x), you also have the option of using Time Machine (which is built into the operating system), but SuperDuper! is still worth the small investment. With SuperDuper! you can make a bootable image of a hard drive to restore the entire operating system.
