Alright, so today I’m gonna walk you through how I cloned my new Mac, the M4 one, yeah that’s the one. I’ve been messing around with it for a bit, and figured it’s time to make sure all my important stuff is backed up and easily transferable, just in case something goes sideways.
First off, I grabbed an external hard drive. You know, one of those portable ones that are pretty much a must-have these days. Made sure it had enough space to hold everything. My Mac’s got a ton of stuff on it, so I went with a bigger drive, just to be safe.
Getting Started
Plugged that drive into the Mac. It popped up on the desktop right away, no fuss. Then, I opened up Disk Utility. It’s this neat little app that comes with macOS, lets you manage your drives and partitions and stuff.
Using Disk Utility
- Found my external drive in the list on the left.
- Clicked on “Erase” to format it.
- I chose the “APFS” format because that’s what Apple recommends for newer systems. Named it something simple like “Backup Drive” and hit “Erase” again.
After that, it was time to actually do the cloning. Now, there are a few ways to go about this, but I like using this app called Carbon Copy Cloner. It’s not free, but it’s worth the money, I swear. Makes the whole process super smooth.
Cloning with Carbon Copy Cloner
- Opened up Carbon Copy Cloner and selected my Mac’s internal drive as the source.
- Then, I picked the external drive, the one I just formatted, as the destination.
- Hit the big “Clone” button, and that was pretty much it.
The app started copying everything over. It took a while, which was expected, considering how much data I have. But I just let it do its thing in the background while I did some other work.
Finishing Up
Once it was done, I had an exact copy of my Mac’s drive, all on that external drive. To test it out, I restarted my Mac and held down the Option key during startup. This brought up the boot menu, where I could choose to boot from the external drive. And guess what? It worked like a charm. Booted right up, and everything was exactly as it was on my internal drive. It really worked!
So, that’s how I cloned my Mac M4. It’s a good idea to do this every now and then, especially if you’ve got important stuff on your computer. Better safe than sorry, right? Plus, it’s not even that hard. Just gotta have the right tools and a bit of patience. This took a while and now I feel way safer having done this process!