cloning an external drive

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Level 1

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cloning an external drive

After a fire (Mac was not affected) I need to clone 4 hard drives to identical new hard drives as restoration company predicts failure down the road. All drives identical LaCie ruggedized 2TB as are the replacements. Do I need to format the new drives first and if so what is the best format? (I'm Mac only, no need for pc compatibility. Do I need to use the same format as the old drives?) If no, do I just plug both an old and a new drive into my mac and follow these instructions that I found on the web or is there more to it or a better way? I also have Carbon Copy Cloner if that's a better approach

Connect both drives to the Mac.
Open Up Disk Utility. ...
Click On The Drive You Want Cloned On The Left. ...
Click restore
Click the drive you want to clone
Click Restore. ...

I need them to be identical to make them work with my Backblaze web-based backup. I'm on Catalina 10.15.7

Thanks!

MacBook Pro 15″, OS X 10.11

Posted on Jun 26, 2021 2:50 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

D.I. Johnson

Level 7

23,705 points

Jun 26, 2021 3:40 PM in response to TRSch

Hello , TRSch.

Too bad about that fire. I think we can help.

First, CarbonCopyCloner is probably the better way to clone those drives, way better that using Disk Utility.

Re: the preferred format - check the format of the old drives. If you have not had any problems using them previously with Backblaze, then format the new ones the same way. Very likely they are Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with GUID Partition Map. You can use Disk Utility to confirm that, or CCC will also show that info to you.

Finally, making the clones is dead simple with CCC. Plug the two drives into your USB ports, choose the Source and Destination drive in CCC and click the Clone button.

Easy as cake!

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