
How to Restore From a Time Machine Backup. How to Recover Deleted Files on Mac: Best 5 Essential Methods. How to Clean Install macOS 12 Monterey in a Few Simple Steps. How to Create a Bootable USB macOS Installer. How to Play Windows Games on a Mac in 2022. How to Open EXE Files on Mac: 3 Best Ways to Open Windows Files on Mac in 2022. You can do the same procedure in reverse if you need to re-copy the files, or restore the backup if your computer decides to fail. Any settings you change or files you save there will not be reflected in your main install. You can use your Mac as usual, but note that it is separate from the installation on your main internal hard drive. This opens the boot switch and enables you to boot from the external hard drive. This can take a long time, depending on the speed of your external drive and its connection to your Mac, so it is better to have a fast hard drive with Thunderbolt connections, USB-C o USB 3.0.Īnd that is! When Disk Utility finishes, you can shut down your Mac and hold the Option key when you restart it. You can also select an ISO image, but that doesn't have much use here.Ĭlick on “Restore” and Disk Utility will start the copy procedure. Select your external drive in the sidebar, click on “Restore” on the menu, and then select your head unit as the option “Restore from”. It is designed to be used from recovery mode to restore your hard drive after a failure.īut, if you choose your external drive as the restore target, you can reverse that action and copy files from your main drive to backup. The button “Restore” in Disk Utility you will copy the files from a backup to your main drive.
This is where we get to that hidden feature we mentioned.
You will be greeted with a list of all your volumes, including its internal hard drive (probably called OS X or Macintosh HD) and your external hard drive. Launch Disk Utility from Spotlight (Command + Space) or from the Utilities folder in your applications. Directly from Disk Utility, no third party apps required Then, even though this is not recommended for everyday use, it is still feasible. These are still much slower than solid state drives (SSD) found in most new Macs. Generally, booting from an external drive will be slower, even with new Thunderbolt and USB-C drives. If you want to keep files in sync between desktop and laptop, expand your storage or have a bootable backup of your system, there is a hidden feature in Disk Utility that makes it easy. There are many reasons for wanting to boot from an external drive.