Powerful disk cloning software to easily and completely clone any hard disk or storage device to another hard disk drive or device. Stellar Drive clone is one of the best disk cloning app for Mac. It creates an identical, ready to use copy of the hard drive. The Clone software creates partitions in the same way as that of the actual hard drive.
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Why Back Up Your PC?
In August of 2016, Delta Airlines had to cancel more than 1,300 flights, at a cost of $100 million, not because of weather or mechanical problems, but because the company's computer systems went down. If it can happen to a big corporation like Delta, don't think it can't happen to you. All technology, whether it's a brand new iMac, a spaceship, a hover board, a webmail service, or a ten-year-old PC running Windows Vista, can potentially take a sudden nosedive.
Hard drives are notorious for crashing, and ransomware can make a computer's contents inaccessible. Sometimes it's not even the fault of the technology: Fires, flooding, and other natural disasters can render PCs and other tech hardware inoperable. And laptops get stolen. You need insurance. With digital content becoming paramount for not only business assets—documents, plans, financial spreadsheets—but also for personal assets such as family photos, videos, and music, protecting with backup software is more important than ever.
Both Windows and Mac OS X have beefed up their built-in backup tools in recent years. Windows 10 includes a File History feature and a full disk backup feature, and OS X includes its Time Machine software. Both of these are well worth running, but they both have some limitations, lacking some of the extra benefits you get from running standalone backup software.
How Backup Software Works
The concept behind backup software is pretty simple: Make a copy of your files on storage separate from your main hard drive. That storage can be another drive, an external drive, a NAS, a rewritable disc, or an online storage and syncing service. Should you lose the files, either through disaster or simply by deleting them or overwriting them, you can just restore them from the saved copies.
But in order for this to work, the copies of your files must be updated regularly. Most backup software lets you schedule scans of your hard drive for new and changed files daily, weekly, or monthly, but my preferred option is to have the software continually (or at least, say, every 15 minutes) monitor your drive for changed or new files. Several products here offer this continuous backup option.
More granular options include whether backups are full, incremental, or differential. The first is pretty obvious—all the data you've selected for backup is copied in its entirety. Incremental backup saves system resources by only backing up changes in files from the last incremental backup, and differential backup saves all changes from the last full backup. With incremental, you need the latest full backup and all the intermediary backup data to restore a file to its original state, whereas with differential, you just need the last set of differential backup data and the first full one.
A couple of security options are usually available when setting up your backup: password protection and encryption. Using both of these is a good idea if the data you're backing up is at all sensitive. Another option offered by many backup applications is versioning. This lets you specify how many previous versions of your files you want to preserve, and for how long. I recommend maxing this out, especially when you're storing backups locally, with no annual fee for hosted online backup. In any case, the incremental changes don't eat up a ton of space.
A step further than the simple copying of files is copying the entire hard drive, including system files, as what's called a disk image. This contains every bit of data on the drive and offers stronger protection, since it enables you to recreate a system after a hard drive failure. Some products can even update a disk image nearly continuously. But that extra protection comes at the price of more complexity in setting up and restoring. Usually you'll need to run a pre-boot environment from startup media to restore a system image, since doing so from within your main OS isn't possible.
For another—highly recommended—approach to backup, consider online backup, also known as cloud backup. Services like Carbonite and Mozy securely send your data over the internet and save it on remote file servers in encrypted form. The big plus of this option is that the data is off your premises, and therefore not susceptible to local disasters. The downside is that they tie you to annual fees, and uploading and downloading backups is slower than loading local copies. Some online backup services, such as IDrive and SOS Online Backup, include software for making local backups, too.
Restoring From Backup
How you set up your backup affects how you can restore it. If you've backed up your entire disk image, you'll need to start the system from bootable media such as a DVD or USB stick that you create in the software. (You should definitely create one of these types of rescue media if your software offers it.) You also may need to attach another external drive containing the backup data along with the boot media. Several of the programs included here even let you restore data from one PC to another that has different hardware. This is useful when you simply want to migrate to new PC hardware, as opposed to recovering from a disaster.
For restoring individual files, several of the applications, such as Acronis True Image and Paragon Backup & Recovery, give you the option of choosing among previous versions of the files you've saved. Which file versions are available to restore depends on how frequently you've run backups. This is why the continuous backup option mentioned above is preferable. With that option, ideally, every time you save a file, it's backed up and you can get back to any previous point in time.
If all or some of this has sounded like a foreign language to you, you should definitely check out PCMag's Beginner's Guide to PC Backup, which offers help and detailed information on the different kinds of backup available to you. The article makes recommendations on what you should back up and what media you should back it up to.
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Below are links to our latest local backup software reviews. Have you got a story about an occasion when backup software saved your bacon or an opinion about one of the applications we've reviewed here? Let us know in the comments below.
Featured Backup Software Reviews:
At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, I cannot stress enough just how important a regularly scheduled backup solution is to the lifecycle of your data. Moreover, know this: One size does not fit all!
When considering data backups, there are documents that can take some time to restore, but how about a desktop? How about an entire office full of desktops? Getting these online with an OS, applications, patches, and settings can range from a matter of hours to a few days, depending on the scope of the project.
The solution for this is called thick imaging. More commonly referred to as cloning, this process involves taking a 'snapshot' of the desktop at a specific point in time. In essence, a base node is created with all of the required software applications, settings, and system patches installed and configured prior to the snapshot being made. The resulting image file is then stored as a backup in the event of a complete system failure. If needed, the contents of the image file can then be read and copied back to the node (or several nodes at once in a process called multicasting), which restores the device back to the point in time when the image was first taken.
While images tend to be rather large in size, hence the 'thick' prefix, they more than make up for the storage size in both their efficiency and ability to get a desktop fully operational in as little as 20 minutes.
Let's take a look at four cloning solutions for OS X to further diversify your disaster recovery plan.
1. Carbon Copy Cloner by Bombich Software
Developed by a former Apple employee, Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) creates a clone of your computer quickly and even optimizes the data on the drive by enabling incremental data backup and removing (or archiving) previously deleted data.
CCC is a completely native OS X application that handles cloning perfectly. It even allows one to boot directly from the external drive in the event that your internal drive fails. Once the failed drive has been replaced, simply initiate a clone process from the external drive to the internal unit, and you'll be synchronized in no time.
The CCC solution is ideal for one-to-one scenarios but misses the mark when it comes to mass deployment, as there isn't server functionality to multicast images over the LAN. Furthermore, all clones must be done one-to-one, which makes deploying more than a few computers at a time cumbersome and time consuming. It's also the most expensive solution ($39.95) on this list, though Bombich Software does offer discounts for education and corporate clients, plus volume licensing and support contracts.
2. Super Duper! by Shirt PocketBest Dvd Cloning Software For Mac
Their tag line states, 'Heroic system recovery for mere mortals.' Super Duper! is an easy-to-use cloning app that allows bootable, block-level clones. It also features Smart Update, which evaluates files on both the internal and external drives, compares the differences, and copies over just the data that's changed since the most recent event. This saves processing time and brings peace of mind, knowing everything is backed up.
Super Duper! has been hailed by many as a one-to-one cloning solution with the flexibility of being able to call bash scripts before and after a backup session, plus the ability to run scheduled, as well.
Similar to other offerings on this list, Super Duper! lacks a server component or one-to-many casting ability to allow mass cloning of multiple computers over a network. Instead, an external HDD must be used to 'sneaker net' the image to each desktop, taking away from the time-saving features, since the process must be performed on each desktop one at a time.
It must be noted, however, that licensing Super Duper! is super simple: One license model exists, and that's it! There are no complex terms or volume license hassles to contend with at a lower price ($27.95) than its direct competitor.
3. Clonezilla Live/SE by Steven Shiau (NCHC Free Software Labs)
Clonezilla is the only free, open-source cloning software on the list. Based off the Linux kernel and supporting countless file systems, Clonezilla has the ability to create an image from OS X — plus it can handle dual-boot and triple-boot environments using Windows and Linux.
Using a Live CD to boot into the desktop, Clonezilla's approach is a little different. While it's creating an image, the desktop cannot be used. The process yields an exact, bit-for-bit copy of the computer's file structure and all the partitions contained therein. This can be used, in-turn, to deploy out to multiple nodes across a LAN.
This leads to the SE version of Clonezilla - the server edition. The SE version can be installed on a server and used for the centralized management of creating images from desktops and pushing them out to other desktops, which vastly cuts down on the time it takes to commission a fleet of office computers.
The one-to-one (or one-to-many) feature found here has one distinct drawback that sets it aside from the previous entries. As mentioned above, the desktop cannot be in use during the imaging process. This means scheduling, while technically still possible, is typically relegated to after-hours cloning sessions involving scripts to ensure a proper backup can be made. This makes Clonezilla a risky proposition, since there may not be anyone to detect an issue with the software until the following business day, which may already be too late.
4. NetInstall/NetRestore by Apple
Apple's NetInstall service is included in the OS X Server (1.0+) app from the App Store ($19.99). A full-fledged server is also included in that purchase, making it quite worthwhile compared to the other offerings on this list.
NetInstall (and its deployment component, NetRestore) work with the System Image Utility found in OS X to elegantly make boot images (NetBoot) for booting over the network, images of Apple computers to be used to mass deploy OS X (NetInstall), or restore existing configuration snapshots (NetRestore). Being designed by Apple, it includes all of the necessary software to get this service up and running — only the hardware and backbone network infrastructure is required.
While working seamlessly in a one-to-one or one-to-many environment, NetInstall's Achilles heel is in the image-building process itself. The modular nature allows for compartmentalization of applications and updates, making it lightweight, but settings and configurations must be executed using scripts. As the scope of deployment or backup grows, so too will the processes exponentially grow, creating a huge overhead that may negatively impact the speed at which the end user will have access to his or her data or a restored desktop in the event of catastrophic loss.
An upside to the modular nature of Apple's offering is the level of flexibility offered for those proficient in bash scripting. A powerful, organized server with a code-minded SysAdmin will be able to literally backup and restore nodes using an efficient workflow, with just the touch of a button!
Best Clone Software For Hard DriveSummaryBest Cloning Software For Mac 2018
Whether cloning one machine or 100 — bootable images, scheduling, and synchronization add efficiency and failover support to your existing disaster recovery plan in a one-to-one environment.
Free Clone Software Download
If SMB/Enterprise support is necessary, augmenting your network with a cloning server brings reliability, integrity, and the ability to mass deploy devices. Redundancy is as important to data backup as multi-factor authentication is to security. It provides a secondary safety net to fall back on in the event the primary one fails.
How To Clone Mac Hard Drive
What cloning solution do you use for OS X in your organization? Share your experience in the discussion thread below.
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