Stellar Drive Clone 3
A small price for cloning, backing up and imaging your Mac’s hard drive
Although Time Machine is a decent way of backing up your Mac, making a full disk image on an external drive is still a good approach to keeping your data safe, particularly if you can make that image bootable in case of emergencies. Stellar Drive Clone lets you clone your drive, create images, and also backup files – all for $39. Thus means it’s going head-to-head with Carbon Copy Cloner, one of the most well-renowned pieces of software around.
At first, we struggled getting the software to create a disk image or clone of our drive. Attempting to create an image, the software would report there was not enough free space, despite us having more than 900GB for a backup of a 500GB drive (which was nowhere near full). Attempting to clone a volume showed the cryptic error 'not applicable' on the drive we were trying to use. The answer was to turn off encryption on the drive volume – but the errors Drive Clone gave meant it took a while to work this out. Parts of Drive Clone were also buggy. Using a Retina MacBook Pro running OS X 10.9, clicking on the Tools option crashed the app. We were never able to get this tab to work. And the backup option was slow, with little progress feedback to let you know how long was left.
Overall, we can’t recommend Drive Clone over Carbon Copy Cloner at this point. It shows potential, but needs work on improving its reliability, in-app help and speed. There is, though, at least a free 30-day trial so you can check it out and see if it suits you. Ian Betteridge