Yes, There Is Another Way To Clone Your Mac’s Disk To A Bootable Backup

One of the absolute best things you can do for your Mac is to make a backup. How many ways or which way you back up your Mac is less important than the fact that you do, but one method that’s highly recommended among experienced users is the highly acclaimed clone.

To clone a Mac’s disk drive means to copy everything on your Mac, bit for bit, to another storage device, usually an external USB disk drive. Such devices are dirt cheap these days, and come in capacities that easily match or exceed the size of the drive in your Mac.

Among Mac users with experience in backing up complex systems, the usual recommendations are SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner, but there are others that do a good job making cloned backups, and cost less. Included on the list is Clone X 4, a fourth generation backup utility. The claim to fame here is a fast cloned backup that’s easy and costs less than one of the best, more than another.

Clone X 4 claims simplicity and that’s what you get in the basic user interface.

As simple as the interface is, there are plenty of options. Clone X 4 will copy an entire disk– everything on your Mac’s startup disk, to a backup disk, a clone so good you can boot up your Mac from the backup and everything is where it should be.

Clone X 4 also lets you clone just your Mac’s System, which makes restoring a Mac a bit easier and faster. It also restores both the Mac’s disk and the Mac’s system so all your apps and files are where you expect them to be.

There’s also an option to create a minimal Mac System disk, which can be placed on the Mac’s disk or a removable external disk, good for emergency backups, quick system restores, or tests. What Clone X 4 does not do is copy a Bootcamp partition that runs Windows (other utilities have that option). Clone X 4 does a bit more than SuperDuper!, though not any faster, and for a few dollars more, but does a bit less than Carbon Copy Cloner, which costs a few dollars more.

Since you’re looking at alternatives to the most commonly known backup utilities, checkout another favorite that’s been running on my Macs for many years. It’s called ChronoSync, and it does syncs and mirrors between Macs and remote storage, and bootable backup clones.