Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

The popular drive cloning app Carbon Copy Cloner is broken in Tiger for reasons beyond the author’s control. There is still an easy way to clone drives on your Mac: Disk Utility and ASR.

My personally preferred method is using ASR in the Terminal. The command to clone a drive is simple.

sudo asr -source / -target /Volumes/Target -erase -verbose

sudo elevates your admin account to root-level privileges for this command.

asr is the utility that does the cloning.

-source / specifies the root of the filesystem as the source for the clone.

-target /Volumes/Target is the path to the drive onto which you’re writing the clone.

-erase erases the target volume so a quick block copy can occur.

-verbose tells ASR to be vocal and let you know what’s happening.

Disk Utility provides a graphical front-end to the ASR command. Start Disk Utility and select a physical disk or partition from the left column. Select the “Restore” tab on the right. Drag a disk or partition from the left column into the “Source” box on the right. Drag another disk or partition from the left column to the “Destination” box on the right. Check the “Erase Destination” box to perform a fast block copy. Skip the checksum if you like. Click the “Restore” button to begin.