[evoLver]

When making a backup of your internal drive, do you just just copy the drive over, or is it best to make a disc image, and in that case how do you do that. I know that this has been asked a million times, but search did not work well.

[Cold Warrior]

Open disk utility, select your (or any) hard drive icon on the left-hand pane. Choose the Restore tab on the right. Drag your hard drive to Source, and your external drive/partition to Destination. It'll make a nice backup you can easily restore from.

You can also use a utility like Carbon Copy Cloner.

[Big Mac]

I use Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility) and its Restore feature. After you open disk utility, click on any disk on the left side pane and in the top right you'll see the Restore button-tab. You then drag to the Source field the Finder icon of the primary drive that you're copying from, and you drag to the Destination field the Finder icon of the backup drive you're going to copy to. Click the Restore button, enter your admin password once or twice and then be prepared to wait a few hours for the Restore to be completed (depending on the size of your drives). Some people say that Disk Utility is slow compared to third party utilities like Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper!, but it's what I use and am happy with. Oh, btw, if you plan to do this operation at regular intervals, it's better to get actual backup software that performs incremental backups. Time Machine in Leopard is one option.

[evoLver]

you guys rock. thanks a million.

[Too Artificial]

Synchronize Pro X is another option.

[Simon]

Another vote for Apple Software Restore in DiskUtility.

It's included for free with every Mac. It's on the install DVD so you don't even need a bootable HDD to clone, and best of all, it doesn't give you any of the issues people using CCC or SD have seen.

[CharlesS]

BTW, if you check the "Erase Destination" check box in Disk Utility, it will perform a block copy instead of a file copy. This should make the copy go much faster, and will probably be a more accurate copy of the original drive as well.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

BTW, if you check the "Erase Destination" check box in Disk Utility, it will perform a block copy instead of a file copy. This should make the copy go much faster, and will probably be a more accurate copy of the original drive as well.

It can do that. But doesn't have to. Depends lot on the size of source and destination volumes. If you check that box and it doesn't do block transfers it's not because you're doing something wrong.

[olePigeon]

Don't forget SuperDuper.

[jmiddel]

I second Cold Warrior's endorsement of Carbon Copy Cloner. It is very safe and free.

[evoLver]

So I'm about to "restore" my laptop hd via Disk Utility, but when I choose restore it says it will erase all of my destination hard drive. Is there a way to make this backup of my laptop into a simple folder of my destination hard drive? Does this "restore" function require that my destination hd become a dedicated clone only?

[Cold Warrior]

You could probably create a disk image large enough to hold the source, then restore to the disk image (mounted and selected as the destination).

[Simon]

If "Erase Destination" isn't selected it will copy stuff onto a volume. The things already there will stay there.