Yesterday I bought a license for Bombich Softwares Carbon Copy Cloner version 3.5.2. I wanted one to be able to make a bootable copy of my OS X boot disk, with OS X 10.7. The purchase went well, and got the license key in the mail.

I took an old 250 GB USB 2 drive and used Disk Utility to make a Mac OS Extended(journaled) partition. Important to select GUID Partition table, found by pressing the Options button.

A nice feature with CCC is that it can clone the Recovery HD volume found on OS X Lion and later. The Recovery HD offer a method of reinstalling OS X(Apple no longer distributes the installer on DVD). You can find more about the procedure on Bombichs site.

I’ve got a mid 2011 Mac mini with 500 GB disk but trying to keep it “clean”. About 140 GB of data took ages to copy.

Rebooting the mac and pressing the options button, I was presented with the which disk i want to boot from. I selected my small 250 GB TrekStore disk and continued with the booting. It humming for a some time before I could log on.

Mission accomplished. A Bootable backup of my main system drive was created.

I now have 3 ways I do backups.

• Time machine
• CCC backup to a virtual Windows box
• CCC bootable backup.