The safest and easiest way to back up all your data is to clone your hard drive to an external drive. The process is easy but some pre-planning and a few extra steps can improve the results. In this short tutorial, I'll guide you through the process.

Prepare the External Drive

1.  The first step requires some thought if your external drive has more gigabytes than the drive you want to clone. If you clone the drive without first partitioning the external drive, you will end up with wasted gigabytes. Launch Disk Utility and select the Partition tab. Click the Options button on the Partition pane and select the correct format for your computer (GUID for an Intel Mac and Apple Partition Map for a PPC Mac). Next, partition the drive into as many volumes as you want. Select Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) as the formatting option for the clone partition.

Choose Backup Software

2.  There are several options for cloning software. A popular shareware option is SuperDuper!. You could also use a commercial, full backup program, like Prosoft Engineering's Data Backup. Install the software of your choice and make certain it works on your computer.

Prepare the Main Drive

3.  Use Disk Utility to repair permissions on the drive you want to clone.

4.  Use Onyx, or a similar program, to run daily, weekly and monthly maintenance routines. Also, use the program to clean out caches, logs and browser histories and downloads.

Clone the Drive

5.  Restart your computer from the main drive (the drive you want to clone) and launch your backup software. Follow the software developer's instructions for cloning your drive.

Test Your Cloned Drive

6.  The last step is to make certain your new cloned drive works properly. Restart your computer from the cloned drive. Check that your most important programs are functioning correctly. If you experience any difficulties, use Disk Utility to repair permissions.

If you followed the steps in this tutorial, you should now have a perfect, bootable backup of your main drive.