this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2026
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I am not sure how much easier Clonezilla can be. It walks you through every step, waits for answers and confirms what you want done.
Yes its easier if you know how, but it certainly is not hard.
As opposed to apple, which makes cloning an entire disk (including boot) a lot more challenging if not impossible now that they sign the system volume.
So in that regard, for a full disk image backup, Clonezilla (with linux or windows) is a lot easier.
How curious.
I am now trying my first backup. There were extra steps and I think I did it correctly, but the web site inundated me with details in a way that Shirt Pocket did not do with SuperDuper.
I haven't used Mac OS regularly since about 2019, so I take you at your word that backing up isn't as easy on Mac OS as it used to be.
With any luck, this just works. There is room for a simpler and gentler introduction to this. Maybe I can publish one.
OK, I want to be helpful. Are you trying to back up the entire disk? Like Clone one drive to a file or another drive?
Or are you wanting to create backups of the data and user information?
First, thank you for trying.
There's what I want and there's what I'm trying to do. 😉
Waving my magic wand, I'd like a bootable backup of my laptop's internal hard drive. This is what SuperDuper does. I would like it to be straightforward: I issue one command, then I can boot from the external hard disk to which I have backed up. For bonus points, restore is merely backup in the other direction.
That is what I'd like.
I'm cloning a drive with Clonezilla and tomorrow I'll try to boot to the backup drive. I would like to understand how restore works, but frankly, I'm not optimistic and I'm not currently eager to risk screwing up my laptop's internal hard disk.
If you do disk to disk clone, you will make an exact copy of the source disk to the destination disk.
BEWARE of booting from usb when the source drive is installed as well!
A modern OS uses UUID's (identifiers) to manage the hard drives. You are effectively creating a drive and partitions with the SAME UUIDS in the USB drive AND the local drive.
There are steps to manage this, but understand it could cause you issues. A simple way to manage that is make sure to simply disconnect the internal drive in the bios when you boot from USB.
OR
Boot normally, and add a virtual machine to the host and run your USB drive inside the host VM.
Also, there are some good videos (from other people) on using clonezilla on their webpage, I know one of them talks about identifying the disks and walks you thought the process of making the clones and restores if that helps any.