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- #HOW TO BACK UP MACBOOK PRO EXTERNAL DRIVE INSTALL#
- #HOW TO BACK UP MACBOOK PRO EXTERNAL DRIVE UPDATE#
- #HOW TO BACK UP MACBOOK PRO EXTERNAL DRIVE FULL#
RELATED: What You Need to Know About Creating System Image BackupsĪgain, these full system backups probably shouldn’t be your primary backup. It may be possible to run it on a different Mac of the same model, or even some other Macs, but we haven’t tested this and your mileage may vary. You’ll have the best results running this on the same Mac it was cloned from (like if that Mac’s hard drive dies, but all its other hardware is okay). Your Mac will start up as normal, but everything will be loaded from you external drive instead of your internal one. To boot from your external drive, simply click on it and click the arrow below it. You’ll eventually see a few booting options.
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To boot from your cloned backup, simply plug your drive into your Mac, press the Power button, and hold the Option key right when the system turns on. When you’re ready, we can test the drive out. Start up Super Duper and you’ll see an extremely simple window.įeel free to eject the drive when the process is complete. We’ll be using Super Duper for this tutorial, but the steps won’t differ much for Carbon Copy Cloner. Both free versions are fine for occasionally creating a bootable backup.
#HOW TO BACK UP MACBOOK PRO EXTERNAL DRIVE UPDATE#
The full versions allow you to schedule updates on a regular basis and update backups with new changes only. Both offer free limited versions, and full versions for $30 and $40, respectively. There are two main Mac options for creating bootable backups: Super Duper and Carbon Copy Cloner. You can technically use Disk Utility to copy your entire hard drive, but the result will not be bootable on an external drive.
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All files on your external drive will be deleted during the backup, so don’t use your Time Machine drive or a drive you use to store important things on. An external hard drive as big as your Mac’s internal drive.It regularly won't hurt the computer, but it may corrupt that disk.You’ll need two things to create your bootable backup: A MacBookPro will do it (I've done it for years on client systems and my own for testing and troubleshooting) but you have to be careful to not accidentally unplug the boot-drive when the system is on and running. The only caveat I'd look out for is the inherent risk of using an external drive to boot the computer. Ultimately Time Machine is just going to ask where it should restore the backup and I see no reason why an external disk formatted as HFS+ wouldn't show up in said listing. If your Time Machine backup is of one of the newer versions of macOS you could be able to boot the computer from the Time Machine backup directly and complete some of the steps outlined above.
#HOW TO BACK UP MACBOOK PRO EXTERNAL DRIVE INSTALL#
Simplest way to do that is connect the drive to the computer and either using the recovery partition or downloading the macOS installer from the AppStore onto the system you'll be able to target the external drive to install the OS (you may even have the option of restoring a Time Machine backup directly from the recovery partition. Its not hard to do honestly, but again you'll have to install the OS. You would be able to do what you're looking for, but you may have to install an OS on the external drive for Time Machine to recognize that as a destination.