Backing up your whole hard drive

To create a bootable copy of your Macintosh Hard drive;

1. It is a good idea to repair permissions on your own hard dDrive before a full system clone. (Use Disk utility > Repair Disk Permissions.) You can set the pre-clone behavior of backuplist+ in the settings panel to erase the destination and/or repair permissions prior to copying. See Settings for more on this.
2. It is not a bad idea to restart your computer too before the clone operation.
3. Be sure the destination drive has "Ignore ownership on this volume" unchecked! Click on the external Hard Drive icon and select "Get Info" from File Menu. At bottom of window see "Ignore Ownership on this volume" checkbox and leave it unchecked.
4. Add your Macintosh hard drive, or your current startup drive to backuplist+ list window. Do not add any other files.
5. Press the Calculate sizes button (optional.)
6. Erase the destination disk or partition - "a clean slate" is best! Be sure it is Mac HFS standard (Journaled if you want that). Again, you can set the pre-clone behavior of backuplist+ in the Settings panel.
7. Select your destination disk using destination "Browse" button or drag the icon of the destination drive into the destination text field.
8. Press "Backup"
9. Backuplist+ will copy the hard drive contents to the destination disk. This could take from 30 minutes to several hours depending on size. My 65GB Drive takes 60 minutes. A 200GB drive may take around 2 hours. At the end it will bless the new system folder so you can start up (boot) from the external disk.
10. To "boot" from the new backup, go to System Preferences > Startup Disk and select the appropriate one and click "Restart...". Always check to see if the backup works and is truly a startup disk - otherwise it is useless if there is crash and you need to restore from there.
11. Note: You can also exclude items from the backup using the Exclude list in the Preferences panel. See more on the exclude list....