Duplicate Your System

Transcript:

Hi! Dezz Asante here from the TechMuzeAcademy with another MixLessons.com video quick tip  for  you today. This one actually has a little bit less to do with mixing and a little bit more to do with the gear that you use to do your mixing work with.  This is again another question that I stumbled upon concerning computer maintenance. Now, I’ll just read it out for you.

“I just got notified from Apple that some IMACs with one terabyte Seagate hard drives have a known defect. So,    I’m hoping to clone my drive to an external and hoping that will work and prevent 20 hours of re-installing the operating system, logic, my plug-ins and so on and so forth. Then when Apple replaces the drive I can just clone  the external back to the internal drive. Anyone had to do this if so are there any other issues and how is it done?”

So, the way…being a Mac user you have an advantage there in that there is a ready solution that’s also free that you can use to accomplish a task like this. Now, in this specific situation the gentleman wanted to clone his drive because he was anticipating having to replace his drive. But this is something that you should also consider doing just as part of your back-up strategy. For those of you who have followed me for a while, you know that I’m very, very big on making sure you have a stringent and effective back-up strategy in place because especially if you do this kind of work for a living or even semi-professionally, your data is your product. Its the thing that you are charging your clients for.

So, you want to make sure you’re well backed-up and the way I do it on the Mac is I use a program called Carbon Copy Cloner. I’ll pull it on the screen so you’d see what it looks like. Carbon Copy Cloner is free and is very, very simple. All you do is you select your main hard drive here. There’s my Snow Leopard drive, I select the drive I want to copy it over to and I hit clone. That’s it. This will make a bootable clone level, like block level clone of my entire system drive and save it in another location, on another physical drive.

And when I say bootable, I mean if your main drive failed…sparks and smoke coming out of it. You could take it right of the computer and still restart your computer and choose your clone drive and boot back to your desktop as if nothing happened.

This allows you well,two things obviously. The one is to back up your system so in the event of a drive failure, or anything like that, you have a complete back-up. But also it would help you avoid downtime, if your drive does fail and  your in a midst of a session, you can just boot to your back up drive carry on get the work done, head to the computer shop whenever you have the opportunity and replace that drive.

So, Carbon Cloner is how its done on the Mac. There’s another product called Superduper which is also apparently very good on the Mac. I believe there is a small  cost to that.

And for you Windows users out there, the product that I use to use when I was running my system off of windows is by Acronis and its called  True Image. This will also allow you to do a block-level clone of your system. Its very easy, its quite painless and its well worth the small amount of time spent to set that up. Just for the piece of mind and the rescue in the event that something dramatic did happen to your system.

If your interested in learning more about some of the alternative options for backup both local back-up like what we’re discussing here and cloud base back-up where you’re actually uploading files to an online server (which is a great way to back-up because you’re whole house could blow up and you can still get your data back from the servers), Head on over to studiobackup.com. I’ve put that site together just as resource for people to check out some of what are the different options for Windows and Mac, both online and offline backup services. So that’s studiobackup.com and we’ll see you on the next quick tip.