Use a cloned drive to recover from Mac failures
Last month, my Mac Studio stopped working. It went quickly from a bizarre error message to the inability to install software updates to a failure to reinstall the base operating system to a trip to the Genius Bar. (Shout out to Apple Genius Jim at the Corte Madera Apple Store for instantly detecting the problem!)
Unfortunately, the solution that got my Mac going again involved entirely wiping the drive. Once I got home from the Apple Store with a functional Mac Studio, I had to pick up the pieces and get my Mac back to a functional state.
It took almost no time because of one choice I made a few years back. And I’m going to encourage you all to make the same choice, if you haven’t already.
I got up and running in no time because I keep a USB drive permanently attached to my Mac Studio, and make sure it’s a complete clone of my drive. When I reinstalled macOS Sequoia, I was able to use Migration Assistant to restore from my cloned backup drive, and it returned me to more or less the same state I had been in when the computer died. (I also rely on files synced with the cloud, which was another help.)
So here’s my two-fold advice for every Mac user, especially if you tend to leave your Mac docked in one place most of the time1:
First, buy an external SSD that’s as big or bigger than your Mac’s internal hard drive. My Mac Studio has a 1TB internal drive and I bought a Samsung external 2TB drive on Amazon for about $175. Today’s external drives are small, silent, and bus powered—a far cry from the external drives of yesteryear. Since my Mac Studio lives under my desk, I just plugged the drive in and slid it next to the Mac Studio in its holding shelf. It’s invisible.
Next, I set a disk cloning program to run every day, in the afternoon, and clone my entire internal drive to the external one. My Mac Studio is currently using Carbon Copy Cloner, but other Macs of mine use SuperDuper! which works more or less the same way. The clone task is automatic and scheduled, so I don’t have to do anything, and it’s as invisible as the drive itself.
Yes, I also do a Time Machine backup—because it’s nice to have redundancy and it can be helpful in grabbing a file that’s changed in the past. It used to be that Time Machine was a must-have because your cloned disk wasn’t really a backup, since it only contained the most recent view of your disk, and if a file was deleted a few days earlier, it would not be retrievable.
But with the advent of Apple’s APFS filesystem, tools like Carbon Copy Cloner use the APFS snapshot feature to fill up all the excess space on your backup drive—remember, I bought a 2TB drive for a 1TB disk—with previous versions of your disk. So there are some extra layers of protection, though I’m still running Time Machine and Backblaze too. You can never have enough data protection.
It used to be that to restore from a clone, you needed to boot your Mac and then clone the copy back to the original disk. These days, they work perfectly with Migration Assistant, so it’s very easy to get up and running in a short amount of time. And of course, the disk I bought runs at USB 3 speeds, so it was even pretty quick. A couple of hours after I brought my Mac Studio home from the Apple Store, it was back in working order as if the disaster had never happened.
- If you roam around with a laptop, it’s a little more cumbersome, though you should still do it. ↩
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