Reinstalling Your Backed-Up Files Using Carbon Copy Cloner ...

My last post discusses my recent catastrophic hard drive failure on my Macbook. There was nothing to be done to save it and so 4 days after the event, my Macbook was returned to me from the Apple shop with a new hard drive with OS X freshly installed. Luckily I had used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a backup of my hard drive to an external disk drive and all that remained was to retrieve the backup and reset my Mac to its previous state. The process was actually very simple in the end but it took about an hour’s worth of Googling and piecing info together for me to to feel confidant enough to start. Losing your hard drive tends to make one cautious! So here is my step by step guide of how I completed the process.

  1. Start with your computer switched off and plug in your external hard drive (or wherever you have you backup saved).
  2. Turn on the computer and hold down the Option key at the same time (for Mac newbies like me, the Option key is the Alt key).
  3. This will bring you into Startup Manager mode, where you can select where you would like to boot the computer from. In order to reinstall the backup files you want to boot from your external drive - double click on this icon.
  4. The computer will now start up from the external drive - login using your password details from when you made the backup.
  5. Open up Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC), click on Preferences and then Disk Utility.
  6. Now you need to erase the current hard drive to make way for the backed-up version. Select the Macintosh HD in the left-hand pane and click on the Erase tab, followed by the Erase button at the bottom of the screen.
  7. Close Disk Utility and return to the CCC program.
  8. Select your backup drive as the source disk and your hard drive, Macintosh HD, as the target disk.
  9. Click on the padlock button and enter your password to unlock the clone button.
  10. You’re ready! Click on the Clone button and just wait for the program to work its magic.

Once the clone is complete, shutdown the computer and remove the external drive. Boot up as normal and you’ll find your Mac restored to its previous state.

* Disclaimer: Follow this at your own risk, this is what worked for me but there is no doubt a better way to do it. Please let me know in the comments if you think I’ve got anything wrong.

Monday, July 02, 2007   Filed in: Apple

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