Creating a bootable back up drive

Since everything is finally running smoothly on my new system with the new FC2 upgrade it's time for me to create the bootable backup drive as everyone has advised. I have a brand new OWC Firewire drive that I will clone my entire hard drive to and make it bootable.

My question is, God forbid in the event that something goes screwy with my internal drive whereby I would have to resort to my external backup drive to boot from, how does that work? Do I plug my external firewire drive into the Mac Pro and it magically knows to boot from the external drive because it has OS X on it?

Someone please 'splain to Lucy.


Thanks

Shelley
MacBoo Pro 2015
16 GB Ram
OS X 10.13
Premiere Pro CC

Lucy'

In the System preference - there is a A Startup Disk icon. Click there and any attached bootable drive will show there. I have a Firewire drive that contains an older copy of my setup under FCP 5.04. I can boot off that anytime I need to go "backwards.

Be sure to use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the entire drive contents to the Firewire drive.

Hi Shelley,

If you were to lose your internal boot drive you could boot from the CCC external hard drive to run your Mac, as mentioned above. After you replaced the bad internal boot drive, while running from the CCC external drive, use CCC again to clone back to the new replacement internal hard drive.

--ken

Still need a little more 'splaining.

I'm not sure if you mean that I would connect the external bootable CCC drive to the Mac Pro, turn on the Mac Pro and it would find the External drive but still utilize the processors and ram from the Mac Pro that has the bad internal boot drive.

Or if you're saying that I would connect my keyboard directly to the external bootable CCC drive and operate solely from that drive? If that's the case, then I don't understand how it could have enough processing power and memory to run Final Cut Studio.

Thanks for your patience on this one.

Shelley
MacBoo Pro 2015
16 GB Ram
OS X 10.13
Premiere Pro CC

The system doesn't run from the drive, i.e. the drive does not supply the power to run applications, the tower is doing all of the processing work.
The drive just contains the system software.
As Ken mentioned, just remove the bad drive, install a new one, turn on the computer, and it will "find" the external bootable drive.
You can then CCC the working drive back onto the new internal drive.
At this point, you can restart from the new internal drive.
BTW
Make sure and run Disk Utility and repair permissions after doing this.

Matt Murray
Lineside Productions
[www.edgesportfishing.com]
Fishing videos, DVD Production, Websites and more.

You can also hold down the option key while starting your computer and it will ask which drive you want to boot from.

Oh, I see -- light bulb coming on.... So the CC external drive really just acts as a container holding all my Internal HD content which I could then clone back to a clean healthy drive.

Thanks.

Shelley
MacBoo Pro 2015
16 GB Ram
OS X 10.13
Premiere Pro CC