How to Clone a Mac Hard Drive (2026): Startup or External

To clone a Mac hard drive, connect a drive at least as large as the one you're copying and use Carbon Copy Cloner ($49.99) or SuperDuper ($27.95) to copy everything onto it. For a data drive (photos, footage, documents) that's the whole job. For your Mac's startup disk, it's worth knowing first that a bootable clone does much less on a current Mac than it used to.

On Apple Silicon Macs, booting always runs through the internal SSD. If that SSD dies, the Mac won't start from an external clone either. Bombich Software, the maker of Carbon Copy Cloner, now recommends a regular backup instead of a bootable clone for most people.

Clone Your Startup Disk or Clone a Data Drive?

These are two different jobs that share a name.

Cloning a data drive means making an exact second copy of an external drive full of files: a footage drive, a photo archive, a client delivery. Any file-copy tool can do it, the copy works on any Mac, and size and format can differ between the two drives.

Cloning a startup disk means copying macOS itself, your apps, and your user account onto another drive, traditionally so you could boot from that drive if the internal one failed or to move to a new Mac. That's the part that changed.

What Changed on Apple Silicon

Three things make a bootable clone less useful on M-series Macs:

1. The internal SSD is always involved in booting. An Apple Silicon Mac uses volumes on its internal storage to start up, even when booting from an external drive. If the internal SSD has failed, Bombich confirmed with Apple engineers that the Mac can't boot at all.
2. Only Apple's tools can make a bootable copy. The system volume is sealed and signed by Apple. CCC can make what it calls a "legacy bootable copy" by calling Apple's own replication utility (ASR), which copies the whole volume block for block.
3. The internal SSD is soldered in. You can't replace a failed SSD and restore a clone onto it the way you could with an old MacBook Pro.

So on Apple Silicon, the practical recovery path is: get the Mac working (or get a new one), install macOS from Recovery, and bring your files and apps back with Migration Assistant from a Time Machine or CCC backup. A bootable clone adds little to that.

On an Intel Mac, a bootable clone still works the traditional way, and CCC still supports making one.

How to Clone a Drive With Carbon Copy Cloner

Carbon Copy Cloner is $49.99 one-time, with a 30-day trial.

1. Connect the destination drive. For a full copy, erase it as APFS first (Disk Utility, select the drive, Erase).
2. Open CCC and create a new task.
3. Click Source and choose the drive to copy.
4. Click Destination and choose the empty drive.
5. Click Start. The first copy takes a while; later runs only copy what changed.
6. To keep the clone current, set a schedule on the task.

For a startup disk, CCC makes a Standard Backup by default (your data, apps, and settings, ready for Migration Assistant). The legacy bootable copy is a separate option in the destination menu and erases the destination.

CCC also has an option to compare file contents during copies and find files that changed or got damaged; it reads every file, so it's slower. Our CCC alternatives guide covers what else does this job.

How to Clone a Drive With SuperDuper

SuperDuper is $27.95 for the paid version, which adds scheduling and Smart Update (copy only what changed). The free version does full copies.

1. Open SuperDuper.
2. Choose the source drive in Copy and the destination in to.
3. Choose Backup - all files.
4. Click Copy Now.

SuperDuper's simple interface is the reason people choose it. It has seen fewer feature updates than CCC in recent years; more in our SuperDuper alternatives guide.

How to Clone a Drive With Disk Utility (Free)

Disk Utility's Restore copies one volume onto another and erases the destination in the process.

1. Open Disk Utility and choose View → Show All Devices.
2. Select the destination volume (the one that will be erased and overwritten).
3. Choose Edit → Restore.
4. In "Restore from," choose the source volume, then click Restore.

It's free and fast, because it copies blocks, but it's all or nothing: no scheduling, no incremental updates, and it can fail when the destination is smaller than the source. It works well for data drives. For startup disks on current macOS, use CCC or Time Machine.

How to Clone One External Drive to Another

For a data drive, you don't need a block-level clone. A file copy gives you the same files, works between drives of different sizes and formats (including exFAT, which Time Machine can't touch), and can be updated with only what changed. In Terminal, with the built-in rsync:

rsync -aE --progress /Volumes/Footage/ /Volumes/Footage-Clone/

Then check the result by content:

rsync -anic /Volumes/Footage/ /Volumes/Footage-Clone/

Any line starting with >f is a file whose contents differ. In my test on macOS 15.5, the default (size and date) check missed a one-byte change that this command caught. Our guide to backing up an external hard drive covers the other ways to do this, including to the cloud.

If you keep several clones of several drives, the clone itself stops being the hard part. Our free duplicate file finder can at least show you which files already exist on more than one of them. Knowing which drive holds which project, and whether both copies are current, is. That's the problem Tusk is built for: it tracks every file across your drives by checksum, including drives that are unplugged.

How Long Does Cloning a Mac Take?

It depends on the slower of the two drives and how much data there is:

Real copies of many small files run slower than these sequential numbers. Later, incremental updates with CCC, SuperDuper, or rsync take minutes because they only copy changes.