How to clone Your Mac Hard Drive with Carbon Copy Cloner

If you're swapping out your hard drive for a new one, the best thing to do is clone the old one first. Cloning a drive simply creates an exact sector-to-sector backup copy of your drive's contents from one single point in time. It's a perfect image of the original, including all OS files. So when you swap out your old drive for the new one, you don't have to tweak or reset anything.

For cloning a hard drive on a Mac, I highly recommend a free utility called Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC). Here's how to use CCC to clone a hard drive on your Mac.