- Joined
- Jul 11, 2012
- Messages
- 637
- Motherboard
- Gigabyte GA Z68XP-UD3
- CPU
- i7 3770
- Graphics
- GT 210
- Mac
- Mobile Phone
In all my life as a Mac user, I used to rely a lot on cloning my MacOS to a disk image, right after installation (I believe since 10.4 until 10.14): it was a real time saver as you could then restore your dmg in a few minutes instead of nearly an hour of installation, creating test partitions, etc.
You could also customize your backup with the most useful of utilities, prepare the main user with all sorts of settings you like most.
Those days are gone and if your disk dies, you're good to reinstall from scratch — and you'd better avoid making dangerous experiments...
Here's an interesting article that sums up what you still can do: https://bombich.com/kb/ccc6/cloning-macos-system-volumes-apple-software-restore
And this one for disk images: https://bombich.com/kb/ccc6/backing-up-disk-image
SuperDuper 3.5 claims to do bootable clones, though, but I haven't tried it: https://www.shirtpocket.com/blog/in...mments/its_a_trip_to_the_moon_not_a_marathon/
For anyone running pre-10.15 MacOS, here's the procedure I've used until now:
- create an empty sparsebundle
- clone your boot drive (preferably from another MacOS of the same version) using CCC or SuperDuper! to that sparsebundle
[- optionally, you can clean up your sparsebundle a bit (it may have copied the VM and sleepimage, for example, or if you wan't to get rid of useless fonts, delete caches, etc.)]
- convert your sparsebundle to a bzip2 dmg (I use DropDMG)
Note that, for example, once you successfully created a 10.14 HFS dmg, you can restore it from 10.11 as long as it is to HFS, of course.
My procedure allows, if you've kept your sparsebundle instead of converting to dmg, to update it — that's what I've done with 10.14 after I updated to the last Security Update.
You could also customize your backup with the most useful of utilities, prepare the main user with all sorts of settings you like most.
Those days are gone and if your disk dies, you're good to reinstall from scratch — and you'd better avoid making dangerous experiments...
Here's an interesting article that sums up what you still can do: https://bombich.com/kb/ccc6/cloning-macos-system-volumes-apple-software-restore
And this one for disk images: https://bombich.com/kb/ccc6/backing-up-disk-image
SuperDuper 3.5 claims to do bootable clones, though, but I haven't tried it: https://www.shirtpocket.com/blog/in...mments/its_a_trip_to_the_moon_not_a_marathon/
For anyone running pre-10.15 MacOS, here's the procedure I've used until now:
- create an empty sparsebundle
- clone your boot drive (preferably from another MacOS of the same version) using CCC or SuperDuper! to that sparsebundle
[- optionally, you can clean up your sparsebundle a bit (it may have copied the VM and sleepimage, for example, or if you wan't to get rid of useless fonts, delete caches, etc.)]
- convert your sparsebundle to a bzip2 dmg (I use DropDMG)
Note that, for example, once you successfully created a 10.14 HFS dmg, you can restore it from 10.11 as long as it is to HFS, of course.
My procedure allows, if you've kept your sparsebundle instead of converting to dmg, to update it — that's what I've done with 10.14 after I updated to the last Security Update.
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