If you intend on using the image on a Windows PC, you may want to convert it to an. When finished you’ll have an exact replica of the Macs hard drive in the form of a. Don’t be surprised if it takes quite a while to create the backup file. The process of creating the disk image can take a very long time depending several factors, including the speed of the Mac, the size of the disk being imaged, and the destination of the image itself.

Back at the main CCC menu, choose “Clone” to create the exact replica of the drive as a disk image file.

Pull down the “Image Format” menu and choose “Read-only disk image”, this saves the image as the familiar DMG format.

Give the disk image a name and select a destination, if you don’t have the local storage capacity for such a large disk image be sure to choose an external or network drive as the image destination.

Pull down the “Destination” menu and choose “New Disk Image”.

Launch Carbon Copy Cloner and pull down the “Source” menu, selecting “Macintosh HD” or whatever the Mac hard disk is named.

Get Carbon Copy Cloner free from Bombich and copy it to the /Applications/ folder.

If the hard drive being imaged is very large the resulting disk image is also going to be large, be sure to have adequate space to support the image or consider saving it to another location. The process below will describe how to create an exact image replica of a selected Mac hard drive.

Make a Disc Image of an Entire Hard Drive in Mac OS X

This tutorial will detail how you can create a disk image of an entire hard drive on a Mac, and then how to restore that cloned disk image to a drive on the Mac as well. Carbon Copy Cloner makes this entire process simple, whatever the reason you need to clone a drive, for both creating and restoring a disk image of an entire Mac hard disk.

What is mac disk image