Restore Your Mac Startup Disk to Another Drive

Note: Create Recovery Drive feature is only available in Stellar Data Recovery Version 10 & earlier! The latest version has eliminated the need of any other Mac or external device. User can directly use Stellar Data Recovery through an activated link.

So, Disk Utility’s restore feature helps you in cloning the source drive to the target drive of equal or more storage space. And it’s such a powerful cloning tool to perform the cloning of damaged, corrupt, or inaccessible source drive. The best part is you can create a bootable drive by using the restore function, so let’s focus on that in the next section.

How to Restore Startup Disk to Another Drive Using Disk Utility on Mac?

Warning: Restoration process of Disk Utility erases the target drive. So, before you perform the restoration task, you must copy all the essential files from the target drive to a different drive to avoid data loss.

Steps to restore your startup disk to another external drive are as follows:

Step 1) Press Command + Space Bar to open Spotlight.

Step 2) Type ‘disk utility’ and hit enter to open it.

Step 3) In the Disk Utility window, go to View > Show All Devices.

Step 4) Select the volume/drive from the sidebar that you wish to restore. This is the target drive and will be erased in the process, so ensure you have backed up all the crucial data to another drive. Click the Restore tab.

Step 5) On the “Restore from” menu, select the startup disk (Macintosh HD) to copy. This is the source drive whose clone is created by Disk Utility. Click Restore and then Done.

Once the restoration process is over, the target drive will get the exact copy of the source drive. Now, the question arises when you need to restore the target drive from the source drive. The next section discusses various situations in which Disk Utility’s restore feature is quite beneficial.

When do you require to restore?

• To duplicate the source drive to the target drive for backup or archival purpose
• To migrate from a low capacity storage drive to a higher one
• To migrate from hard drive to SSD
• To recondition an SSD
• To copy the disk image file to another volume or drive
• To salvage a corrupt, inaccessible, or malware infected Mac storage drive from its perfect backup copy
• To copy a bad-sector-stricken or damaged hard drive to a healthy drive for data recovery
• To create a recovery disk from the Mac boot drive
• To reinstall macOS together with all its drivers and applications to several Mac systems, which simplify the storage drive provisioning process

The cloning of startup disk to another external drive is explained before. You can use the same steps to perform restoration in other cases, but ensure you choose the right source drive and target drive to avoid data loss. In case you accidentally erase the wrong drive, then employ a Mac undelete file software to scan, preview, and recover lost data.

What are the advantages of working on disk clone for data recovery?

• It helps stop any further damage to the faulty drive thus prevents losing more data.
• It is quite faster to read data from a clone than attempting to read from an impaired storage drive.

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Conclusion

The blog described the Disk Utility method to restore your Mac startup disk (Macintosh HD) to another drive. It also shared various scenarios that induce you to restore a drive by using Disk Utility.

The best thing about restoring Mac boot drive to another drive is that this disk clone is bootable just like the startup disk. This is because unlike regular copying, disk cloning involves copying of in-use as well as hidden files. Further, disk clone is useful in varied situations especially in data recovery.

You must use Disk Utility’s restore feature with utmost care because it involves drive erasure. And if you erase a drive with stored data, then only a Mac undelete software is your savior to regain your precious data.

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About The Author

Vishal

Vishal is a data recovery expert @Stellar. He addresses data loss scenarios on a Mac. He intends to help people solve their macOS problems. Besides, Vishal prefers to read about astronomy and autobiography, and his favorite is Steve Jobs - The man who thought different written by Karen Bluementhal.