Can Acronis (Windows) clone Mac OSX Partitions?

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Ok, so my new SSD is coming in a few days. I'd like to pop out my MacBook Pro HD and swap it with the SSD.

PRoblem is I don't want to reinstall everything.

Now I can easily pop both drives into my PC which has Acronis Disk Director. I've cloned Windows drives before (like when I migrated from HDD to SSD in May), but can Acronis handle Mac Partitions?

If not I can always do it the old fashioned way of reinstalling but it's nearing finals time and I'd rather focus on doing my assignments than spending days on restoring my MacBook.

Sorry this is a Mac related question but since I wanted to solve this using PC software (Acronis), if someone can help me that would be great.

If this doesn't work, is there some other PC-based software that will let me clone a Mac OSX drive? I can't think of any other easy way to plug in 2 drives other than to transfer my mobile HD to my desktop and work that way....

 

[evilspoons]

Do you have an external hard drive? Tell your Mac to do a Time Machine backup to that hard drive. Then, start to install Mac OS X to the blank SSD but tell it to restore the backup from the Time Machine hard drive.

You will have a "new" install but it will move all your applications and user data into place. I've done this three or four times and I've never found anything broken or missing. OS X, being *NIX-based, has very good separation between user data, applications, and system files.

 

[Oyeve]

Cant you hook up the SSD and use apples timemachine backup thingy?


Oops, didnt read the reply above mine.

 

[TheStu]

Even better than Time Machine for this sort of thing will be Carbon Copy Cloner. Free, easy to use. Just pop the drive into an external, hook it up to your Pro and boot off of it. Clone the date from the HDD to the SSD, and call it a day.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

I don't have an external hard drive. All my hard drives are 3.5" and in computers. I suppose I could get a 3.5" enclosure. I somehow don't believe in external drives as I like to have enough internal storage. I guess this is the time where it bites me in the ass for not having an enclosure....

 

[DaveSimmons]

You can also get USB docks and bare IDE/SATA to USB adapters instead of enclosures, that could be easier for temporary use if you want to put the drive back into a PC later.

Keeping all your backup drives inside PCs doesn't seem safe to me -- one bad power supply (or a break-in and computer theft) could fry all of the drives at once. A hard drive in the closet would probably be ignored, at least once prices go back down again.

 

[Dahak]

the windows cloning software will not work clone mac hard drives unfortunately.

Best option is to get a external usb dongle or enclosure and use either Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! which I have used both to great success

 

[darosen]

Usually Mac partition or drive does allow windows users/software to view a mac formatted HDD. But not to clone it. In this case the only way is to use a mac drive clone tool. Hope this helps.